Permission to Create — Tresta Payne

I want to be productive. I am a stay-at-home mom and you'd think the day was mine to schedule but it takes over, this life of 4 busy kids and homeschool and sports and we're-outta-milk-again. Sometimes I re-do the same task 10 times before dinner and that doesn't look like progress, or productivity.

So I try to make boxes to fit it all in so that at the end of the day, when my husband comes home soaked from the rain and tired from building a house, I can have something to show for my day and I can say that I've built a home, too.

Productive. See my list??

But I want to be creative, also. And I guess I feel I need permission for that, because I'm not professionally creative and some of it just seems frivolous and how can I sit and create when he's out there laboring? Can I be creative and productive? Because sometimes the two seem mutually exclusive.

It's guilt that steals the joy right out. I bring it on myself, with comparisons and skewed value systems.

I read about the tabernacle in the dessert and I hear how God call the skilled workers by name, about their handiwork and their talents and their labor-in-creating. I read it in Exodus after he leaves for work in the dark. The ones who were willing came and offered what they had, their gold and their skills, their beauty and their creativity.

And God made a place of worship out of their offerings.

The people willingly offered their most beautiful and precious things, and their time and their creative skills, and all of it God used to make that place for His worship. Productive creativity.

I think about this home and what we want it to be. My husband built it with his own hands and it challenged him, every step of the way. He enjoyed the work and he learned and he fought and he was patient with it. Six years of it. And in the end he has created a place to worship, too.

Because of the people in it, and Jesus in them. We are the temple for His Spirit and Jesus in us makes us a living tabernacle, right? We carry around the Spirit of God and every place we are becomes His dwelling place, and shouldn't we surround that with beauty?

Doesn't He surround us with beauty?

So be it flowers or words or colors or smells or tastes, building houses or making a home, it's all valuable. And that's what I needed to hear, that creating is valuable, and that creating a place to worship is highly esteemed in God's eyes. The ones who built the frames that held the tapestries, and the ones who spun the yarn and died it blue and purple and scarlet, they all were productively creative and God brought it all together to make a holy dwelling place.

We want our home to be a holy dwelling place. A place where we and our children are creatively productive and where beauty surrounds. Which means that this place needs general maintenance and picking up but also, creative license. Permission to be creative.