Creativity inspires Choices
“It’s finished!” I shouted out loud with joy. With the last brush stroke, I had learned more about patience and the willingness to spend time with God to express His beauty through my eyes in an artwork. I started my cleanup routine. I put the paints away, cleaned the brushes, and took a deep breathe and one last look at the painting before I took off my apron and sat down to pen some thoughts.
As I quietly sat at my writing table, these words were on my heart. “Creativity gives us strength to follow our hearts’ desires.” As I wrote these words, I was reminded of a bible verse I had recently read:
The Lord alone is our radiant hope and we trust in him with all our hearts. His wraparound presence will strengthen us.
Psalm 33:20
As I sat on these words, I found myself drawn to a story about Lilias Trotter (1853-1928) who found her calling to see beauty in all things and to revolutionize mission work as we know it. To innovate missionary work in lands that one is not a native of is not an easy feat, especially for a woman of the Victorian era.
He has made everything beautiful in its time.
Ecclesiastes 3:11 (NIV)
As I read the story, I found myself thinking about how our creativity from God inspires us to see beauty in all things through his eyes to our hearts.
And through his creative inspiration this Living Expression made all things, for nothing has existence apart from him!
John 1:3 (TPT)
Lilias was a gifted watercolorist who chose a path to help women in poverty. Her story — lost for close to 100 years — was only recently uncovered by biographer Miriam Huffman Rockness.
Early in her career, Lilias’ naturally-gifted talents were admired by the artist and philosopher John Ruskin. After several years of training with him, Lilias decided to let art and her creative heart play a different role in her life.
In her journals, she wrote and sketched with appreciation for the world she lived in. She also wrote about how she had a desire to put her artistic talents to use for something better. In March of 1888, she traveled with two female friends to Algeria, which was unheard of at the time. She had no cross-cultural training or church affiliation.
Their first ministry outreach started in Algiers, where they worked with the women and children discarded from their families. She wanted to not only teach them the word of God, but give them marketable skills, much like the work she did with women in London, so they would have economic independence to grow.
Throughout her forty years in Algeria, she would always find beauty—whether it was the lilies that grew from the desert floor or a bee jumping from one flower to another—as a message of God’s kindness and grace, in everything He has created for us to see and enjoy.
Though she chose a life that was seen as a hard road to those she left behind in England, she served the Algerian people with a devoted heart. The work she began revolutionized mission work as we know it. Her innovative approach to helping women and children is still being used and her legacy of planting a single seed of faith carries forth today.
In one of Lilias’ journals, penned during one of her more challenging times in Algiers, are these words:
“A bee comforted me very much this morning. He was hovering above some blackberry sprays just touching flowers here and there, yet all unconsciously life, life, life was left behind at every touch, as miracle-working pollen grains were transferred to the place where they could set the unseen spring working. We have only to see to it that we are surcharged, like the bees with potential life. It is God and His eternity that will do the work.”
Diary, July 9, 1907 from the book Images of Faith by Miriam Huffman Rockness
She was a woman who chose to see beauty in all things through the eyes of God.
The light of dusk washed over my studio as I finished reading about Lilias. As I closed the book, I felt as though I knew her and could understand her artistic heart and the ways in which she looked at beauty in all people and things. Why did this story about her life and my learning through patience coincide? We are all children of God.
I was also reminded that in the face of hard choices or difficult decisions, when we follow our hearts to pursue our creative calling from God, the road does not become a difficult path but blossoms into a greatest masterpiece.
For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.
Ephesians 2:10 (NLT)
May I leave you with some closing thoughts from Lilias Trotten, penned in her book, Parables of the Cross.
Shall we not let Him have His way? Shall we not go all the length with Him in His plans for us—not, as these ‘green things upon the earth’ in their unconsciousness but with the glory of free choice? Shall we not translate the story of their little lives into our own?”
She looked to the natural world as a place of great beauty and inspiration.
No matter what the situation may be, be inspired by the simplicity of life. Let your creativity inspire you to follow your heart’s calling from God to live a life full of endless possibilities.
