Cam McVey

So, I had great fun being on the radio last night. The lovely Lorna Far­rell invited James Ren­wick, the Heal­ing Rooms intern, and myself onto her even­ing show on Revival FM to talk about Heal­ing Rooms and heal­ing in gen­eral. A touch nervous as I set off for the sta­tion, but armed with a raft of web­site print outs, I met with James at Star­bucks to plan out who was going to cover what.

Of course, as soon as we got settled in the stu­dio, Lorna imme­di­ately put us both at ease and the con­ver­sa­tion flowed from there. Plenty of laughs, a lot of good talk about heal­ing and what God is doing in Scot­land in this day, and some prayer for listen­ers who got in con­tact made for a quick two hours which went pretty well!

It got me think­ing though — how great it is that three people talk­ing about some­thing they’re into can be enter­tain­ing for oth­ers. That com­ing together and talk­ing is a very simple form of cre­ation. Lorna cre­ated enter­tain­ment just by ask­ing us inter­est­ing ques­tions and oth­ers benefited from that act of cre­ation. It also, for me, high­lights one of the most import­ant aspects of cre­ativ­ity: that it causes new things to exist simple through a nat­ural, built-in, aspect of our human­ity. That’s just crazy to me. But it makes per­fect sense. If we are chil­dren of the God that defines cre­ativ­ity — all cre­ation is His work — and we are made in His image and like­ness, that means we too are cre­at­ive in the same man­ner. My pas­tor, Jake Chad­ney, writes more elo­quently and con­vin­cingly about this in an art­icle called “Cre­at­ive Growth”.

We as a church have had a couple of week­ends together explor­ing cre­ativ­ity for creativity’s sake. We called them Cre­at­ive Dis­cov­ery Week­ends and there was a good selec­tion of dif­fer­ent things to try. The point was to engage in the cre­at­ive pro­cess, not to do ‘good art’. I feel the dis­tinc­tion between arty and cre­at­ive can be summed up like this: that art is there to be judged and there­fore, to some extent, can be good or bad. The cre­at­ive pro­cess, how­ever, is just that — a pro­cess. It is neither good nor bad, attract­ive or ugly. It is the exer­cise of tak­ing a base sub­stance — clay, paint, ideas, blank film, a musical instru­ment — and pro­du­cing some­thing. And that act of birth­ing some­thing new is exciting!

There is an intriguing art­icle that I read the other day that states this:

The labor one per­forms trans­forms some­thing in the envir­on­ment, which in turn trans­forms you. The act of cre­ation shapes you as a man, refines your sens­ib­il­it­ies, improves your strengths, hones your con­cen­tra­tion, and builds your char­ac­ter. Pass­ive con­sump­tion leaves you untouched and unchanged. Con­sump­tions breeds indif­fer­ence; cre­ation begets empowerment.

Wow! The act of cre­ativ­ity can expand your whole char­ac­ter? Now you have my attention!

And that, I sup­pose, is a great mani­festo for the exist­ence of this blog. I hope that the act of occa­sion­ally sit­ting down and form­ing a thought or mak­ing an obser­va­tion or a con­nec­tion between things will, in turn, open up more cre­ativ­ity in me. I want to grow in this area. I want to be cre­at­ive in my think­ing because I believe we’re com­ing into an age where the old argu­ments and wis­dom will no longer cut it. That we will need to have a cre­at­ive capa­city to make the con­nec­tions between what God is doing and what man is strug­gling with.

So, although this entry has meandered a bit, it has awakened in me just a touch more cre­ativ­ity, and that’s good enough for me!