What is Creativity?

I’d like to offer a definition of creativity:

Using the resources God has given you to make something that benefits you and others.

The first thing to notice in this definition is that we don’t create out of nothing. There are always resources that we draw from. Resources include raw materials, such as paper, pen, piano, pipe. Raw materials also include your culture, your personality, how you were raised. And raw material includes all of the stream of ideas that have flowed down to you through the millenia. Creativity grows out of all the materials that God has given you.

Once you have the raw materials, you combine them. Most of the time, this combining takes the form of “What if?”

• What if our perceived reality was actually a matrix meant to keep us in subjection? (From the 1999 movie, The Matrix.)
• What if “She Loves You,” meant not you, but someone else? (The 1964 song by The Beatles.)
• What if The Wizard of Oz was a fake? (The 1900 book by L. Frank Baum, and the 1939 movie.)
• What if the sky doesn’t ultimately shelter us from the brutality of life? (From the 1949 book by Paul Bowles and the 1990 movie The Sheltering Sky.)

For a more basic example of combining things, what do frogs and paint have in common? What’s the first thing that comes to your mind? How might that connection be shown visually? When your imagination fills in the blank, you’re creating. 

Creativity is not limited to fine art paintings or Beethoven’s compositions. It’s so much more than that. We’re creative in almost any area of our life. Among many other things, we see it in our choice of clothing, carpet and cars.

Starting a business is a great example of creativity. Entrepreneurs see connections between needs and solutions, and then build businesses around providing those solutions. They take the raw material God has given them, and they craft a different way of benefiting others. 

Which gets us to the last part of the definition – creativity is when you build something that benefits you and others. 

Yes, it can be argued that art is inherently self-standing, that it doesn’t need to be seen, heard, or touched to be art. I’m not completely sure about that. First, take it from the perspective of how you have experienced other people’s art. Think about your spirit soaring, or your heart breaking, or the goosebumps, tears, chills, dreams, laughter, clapping that art has pulled out of you.

Secondly, are you ever 100% satisfied if no-one knows or appreciates your creative expressions? Your tattoos, songs, hair-style, t-shirts, poems, instagram, etc?

Creativity is meant to benefit you and it’s made to benefit others.

In the creation of the universe, God experienced great joy. Consider the voice of wisdom, who rejoiced in the presence of creation in Proverbs 8:27-31.

And the benefit of creation to us? The sunset, blue whales, black-eyed susans, the touch of someone we love, snow, fireflies, tree, streams, alpha centauri, the light side of the moon, and all the other seemingly endless, wonderfully diverse works of God.