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    Waking Up Grey: An Exploration of Creative Awakening
    Waking Up Grey: An Exploration of Creative Awakening
    Waking Up Grey: An Exploration of Creative Awakening
    Ebook216 pages5 hours

    Waking Up Grey: An Exploration of Creative Awakening

    By Jennie Schut

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    About this ebook

    Waking Up Grey offers readers ways to reconnect with their God-given capacity to create. Join others in an intimate journey of rediscovery. Experience how God has wired many to participate in and enjoy the creative process. Readers include professional artists desiring more fullness, those pondering the question of their creative existence, and everyone in between. Waking Up Grey be read as part of group study or individually.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMorgan James Faith
    Release dateJun 9, 2017
    ISBN9781683502081
    Waking Up Grey: An Exploration of Creative Awakening
    Author

    Jennie Schut

    Jennie Schut founded Fly Forward in 2007. Since then, hundreds of women have experienced creative and spiritual exploration, awakening, and flourishing through educational materials, small groups, retreats, workshops, leadership training and art instruction. Jennie works with and teaches oils (painting) and encaustics (a wax-based medium) in her home studio and workshops in middle Tennessee. She holds a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in painting from Middle Tennessee State University.

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      Book preview

      Waking Up Grey - Jennie Schut

      one

      A NEW HIDING PLACE

      The Call to a New Hiding Place

      You have been invited. Jesus is inviting you to uncover, discover and recover your beautiful calling of creativity. He is inviting you to come out of hiding. Why do we prefer our fig leaves over the glorious robe He has given us to wear? The King is inviting us to take our rightful place in His kingdom. In the weeks to come, you will spend time with Jesus in solitude. Th rough various tools and exercises, you will discover what has been so compelling about staying hidden. You will learn to emerge from hiding as Jesus reveals how He has wired you to create. He has set this time aside and ordained it. Your senses will be heightened; your ears will recognize the sound of His voice. Your eyes will see that God is on the move, inviting us to be intoxicated by His beauty as it breaks into our brokenness, to the end that you and I will be different, more fully alive and present to our lives.

      We must first understand and shift our thinking about creativity. Many people of faith today do not feel the freedom or calling to be creative. To many, it feels unnecessary, or extravagant, or somehow contradicts responsible Christian living. This thinking is erroneous because God is not miserly. To be a Christian is to imitate the character and mind of Christ. My dear friend and mentor Andi Ashworth, in her book Real Love for Real Life, describes the character of God in this way: We serve a God of creativity, sacrifice, and extravagance. We, too, are called to reflect these characteristics…¹

      The following is a list of principles—the Creative Basics, if you will—that guide the concepts in this book. This is God’s story woven throughout all of scripture… a story that is still being told today.

      creative basics

      We have been made in the image of God; into His likeness.

      With the Fall, there was a terrible distortion and disintegration of ourselves as image-bearers of God, but our true nature as image-bearers remains.

      Jesus, who rescued us, is even now in the process of restoring His image in us.

      Part of His restoration includes our aesthetic, creative sense.

      God reveals Himself as we tend to the creative process in ourselves.

      We bring pleasure to God when we worship through the creative process.

      The world needs truth, beauty and goodness. He delights when we create to bring about more of these within the grand narrative.

      Solitude, silence and listening promote worshipful creativity.

      Creativity is a stroll, a long walk with Jesus.

      When we gaze upon the beauty of God, our art tends to tell a story.

      Our creative process is a natural outpouring of having been with the Creator.

      He has ordained us to be creative and champions our work.

      We will come back to these. Make a copy, embellish it, and hang it somewhere in plain view. In order to experience freedom, you must believe that you are a character in the grandest story ever told! When your thinking shifts into the setting, plot, and characters within this huge narrative—eyes focused on the Master Storyteller—suddenly your capacity to create enlarges. The depth and vastness of His narrative captures your creative mind and imagination and brings life into the page, canvas, dance floor, strings, etc. You have been with the King and have believed what He has told you.

      Call forth what you do well and name it. You will find you have been creative all along and just need to declare it out loud.

      One challenge we must face is how we define creativity. Creativity is bringing order. When we bring order to something, we are offering up creative worship. When I paint or draw or write, there is a working out or bringing order to my emotional life, my worldview, my attitudes, my intellect as well as my creative ideas. If you are one who has never considered yourself to be very creative, sometimes what we really need is to have it called forth. There is a school of thought that we are either left-brained or right-brained people. While there is definitely a dominant side in each of us, we all have the capacity to use both hemispheres. If you have thought of yourself as a left-brained person (structured, organized, orderly, administrative, analytical), consider this: An extremely well-organized closet, for instance, can be a work of art. It brings beauty and order to an otherwise chaotic, cluttered space. It takes great thought and attention to bring beauty into neglected places. It requires creative energy. You have the capacity for making things. If you feel you are deficient in right brain activity, it is time to tap into that side and explore the possibilities. I love how Anthony Hoekema amplifies the ways we can express our creativity! …by [reflecting] the image of God in the broader or structural sense we mean the entire endowment of gifts and capacities that enable man to function as he should in his various relationships and callings."² Call forth what you do well and name it. You will find you have been creative all along and just need to declare it out loud.

      Art forms are abundant. Listening with curiosity is an art form. Something as simple as welcoming someone unexpectedly into your home requires creativity. Transforming leftover mashed potatoes into shepherd’s pie takes thoughtfulness and creativity. Be on the lookout for the ways creativity is already present. Name what is already there and let it lead you to further exploration. What creative outlets do you already say yes to? What do you say no to? Pay close attention to this.

      yes
      no

      To be human is to create. Because we are designed in this way, creativity has profound meaning to God and to those who are exposed to our creative work. Whether it is creating a beautiful home as the backdrop for family gatherings and memories or rendering paint on canvas, whatever creative calling God has given you must be called out of hiding and named. Exploring how we fit uniquely into God’s creation story frees us to uncover our creative wounds, find healing, and move forward in telling our individual creative stories!

      The Already of God’s Story

      It is important as you begin this process to not merely know, but to be alive to the fact that you are the beloved. We are beautiful to the Father. In Numbers 24:1-9, it says the following: When Balaam saw that it pleased the Lord to bless Israel, he did not go, as at other times, to look for omens, but set his face toward the wilderness. And Balaam lifted up his eyes and saw Israel camping tribe by tribe. And the Spirit of God came upon him, and he took up his discourse and said, ‘The oracle of Balaam the son of Beor, the oracle of the man whose eye is opened, the oracle of him who hears the words of God, who sees the vision of the Almighty, falling down with his eyes uncovered. How lovely are your tents, O Jacob, your encampments, O Israel! Like palm groves that stretch afar, like gardens beside a river, like aloes that the Lord has planted, like cedar trees beside the waters. Water shall flow from his buckets, and his seed shall be in many waters; his king shall be higher than Agag, and his kingdom shall be exalted. This description, given by an enemy of God, is an intricate description of the Israelites, what God sees as He gazes upon His loved ones. What poetry! How fierce is His love for me, for you! Let’s learn together how to walk in the confident knowledge that, because we are His, we give Him great pleasure. His delight gives us freedom to worship through different art forms. When we paint, write, sing, frame the snapshot, we are dancing with Jesus. He delights not only in the offering, but also in your courage and faith to engage in creative worship.

      Hide and Seek

      God will always send us to places that require faith. Exploring our creativity requires that we exercise that faith muscle. At times, our response to the challenge of flying forward will not be that of faith, but a game of hide-and-seek with God. Cynicism speaks into our shame of being naked, insinuates that we already know how the world works, and displaces hope. Richard Rohr, in Everything Belongs, writes, If contemplation teaches us to see an enchanted world, cynicism is afraid there is nothing there.³ Our hearts, because of shame and fear, drive us to go into hiding. We hide from ourselves, others and especially God. In our isolation, we become elusive. We hide behind our favorite mask: that glittering image of religiosity and morality, or autonomous self expression that is liberated from social and cultural expectations. However, our false, inauthentic self emerges; it comes out of the fear that has cast its shadow over our yet-again-incarcerated hearts. We refuse to be found.

      What would happen if we let God find us? He has come looking for us. We can’t evade Him forever. This game of hide-and-seek started back in the garden after the Fall. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ And he said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself’ (Genesis 3:8-10). We are naked before God. He is not afraid of our nakedness as we are. Enduring the gaze of God in our nakedness requires not only faith, but also a relinquishment, a surrender. We must relinquish our cynicism, our desire to shrink away and hide, and give Him our shame, fear and control. The courage to surrender comes from the Spirit of God. Maybe this is what His strength perfected in weakness means: our surrender brings us into a new place of hiding, hidden with Christ in God. It would be appropriate to hide. We have always needed a place to hide, from the time when we were small children. Back then, we needed a place that was safe from all the big, terrifying monsters under the bed. Now, we need a safe place from all the big, terrifying monsters roaring in our own hearts. Back then, the place to hide out was in a daddy’s embrace. Now, the place to hide out is still the Father’s embrace, but we’ve chosen other hiding places.

      Hiding in God is something that is strung all throughout Scripture. God is referred to with such names as Refuge, Hiding Place, Fortress, Shelter. Do you know that it is okay to feel the need to hide? Don’t interpret your strong desire to stay hidden as something that is cowardice, sheepish, foolish or bad. He understands our need for refuge and has made provision for it. The question we need to ask is, Where are we hiding? Where we hide has strong creative implications. If you are hiding behind security for fear of uncertainty, you won’t take any sort of creative risks. If you are hiding in God, who has given you a calling to create (which He has because you’re human), then freedom comes to exercise those callings with pleasure and joy. This assurance only comes from being in the Fortress of God. This kind of freedom is not found in any other hiding place we

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