I had a memory, sweet sisters, of my mother teaching me to sing a cute little children’s song.  “Look all the world over; there’s no one like me.  There’s no one exactly like me.”  I know she couldn’t have known the perils I would face over a lifetime of wanting to be like everyone else and desperately falling short.  She encouraged me to be different, reminding me I was unique and it was ok.  That is what our Father does for us sisters, reminds us that we are indeed fearfully and wonderfully made, one of a kind, original.  We are not a carbon copy of each other, and it’s ok.  

On our journey of freedom, we are making transitions, learning to live by faith, receiving instead of taking, and non-fruity fruit is slowly but surely beginning to appear.  The boulder-lies are seemingly smaller because we simply don’t believe them, the pits of emotion are easier to hop over, we tell the mountain lions to move on, and things are beginning to take shape.  

The uncreative life is a life of passions and desires, a life of impulse, and a life of responding to signals from others.  The uncreative life is well-charted with nicely defined lines as we copy the behavior of others or imitate stereotypes.

Before creativity happens, before we live uniquely, a genuine work must take place—-we must withdraw from what other people demand that we be, from routines and habit, preconditioned responses.  We must crucify the flesh!  We begin by not doing.  Creation is not copying, not filling an order, not handing God a preformatted page for him to color.  We must risk ourselves to the new—-the life of faith.  And that, my sisters, is difficult to do.  

Paul warns against veering away from the free creative life before us and returning to the “it’s just easier this way” life.  “Let us have no self-conceit, no provoking of one another, no envy of one another.”  Creativity does not come from a life of competition.   Being unique does not come from trying to be like another.  We must set our compulsions and desires aside before creativity can begin.  

Create what?  You ask me.  We are free to live creatively by forgiving.  Paul says, “Sisters, if a woman is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual should restore her in a spirit of gentleness.”  (I adapted that).  Forgiveness is an immensely creative act.  Condemning is a reactionary (conditioned) response.  Condoning is laziness—-avoiding the difficulties of dealing with what is wrong in the world or people.  When we forgive, we do the creative work of not trying to stuff someone else into a precut mold. 

“Bear one another’s burdens…If anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself.”  We are free to live creatively by helping.  We aren’t free when we must keep ourselves rigidly upright to prove (to ourselves and the world) that we are upstanding.  However, when our identity is firmly rooted in Christ, we are free to stoop to the level of the person crushed under the heaviness and help them up and onward.  

Our journey back uphill is not a solemn, solitary trek.  We are free to put ourselves in the company of the fallen.  We watched Jesus do precisely that, sex workers, cheaters, and diseased; He stooped to their level and extended his hand.  Forget public opinion; we are free to be the unique creation of our creator God’s design. 

“But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor.  Each person will have to bear their own load”  We are free to be responsible. There is an appalling waste of creativity when we do not “bear our own load” but run around picking up the loads of others.  Everyone has the ability to talk a good game, to talk about their creativity, and their freedom, but they never develop the responsibility to express said creativity.  

Sisters, we are free to be who we are, but we also bear the responsibility to be who God created us to be.  It’s a choice we must make, to be me or to be someone else.