Archive - Writing RSS Feed

LTWGMY DAY 3: What Bowling has to do with Building Culture

One of the pleasures of writing Lead the Way God Made You was the opportunity to interview some amazing church leaders. Here’s an interview from the book with Craig Jutila. At the time this book was written, Craig was on staff at Saddleback. Craig talks about what it took to install a new ministry culture in his department.

Larry: What is culture?

Craig: Culture is the way things are done. It’s the vision, values, and behaviors of a group. Look, there are no written rules out here in California that you can’t paint your house pink if you wanted to. But no one does it. Why? It’s not part of the culture.

Nowhere at Saddleback is it written, “You’ve got to be flexible,” but it’s part of our culture.

I tell prospective staff, “You won’t last six months if you aren’t flexible.” Even though it’s not written down it’s how things are done.

This year during Easter season we had to add another weekend service. This decision was made the Wednesday before the launch of the service. You’ve got to be flexible to make it in this culture.

Larry: Craig, rebut this objection: “I have so many pressing things to do to get ready for Sunday. I don’t have time to worry about our culture.”

Craig: People who think this way probably have an issue getting people to serve out of a sense of vision and not merely out of need. Scripture says, “without a vision the people will perish.” The New Century Version says, “Without a vision, the people run wild.”

Truth is, you’re building a culture whether you know it or not. The issue is whether you are building a good culture or a poor culture.

Larry: What are some of the biggest threats to a healthy culture?

Craig: Turnover. If you don’t keep staff long-term, you can’t build a culture well.

People need to be a part of your team for about six years before they start to fully experience your culture. If someone stays on your staff six months or three years and then punts, they never experience the benefit of being a part of the culture. If they could have just stuck it out a little bit longer, they would have experienced the pay off.

That applies to the turnover of volunteers also. Say your volunteers rotate through your children’s ministry once a month. That’s twelve times a year. They have no chance of assimilating your culture.

Larry: What are the “push buttons” that you use to get at your culture and shape it?

Craig: Story telling. Every culture needs those “tribal story tellers” who preserve the important milestones in every organization. Every healthy organization needs a historian.

Around here, one of our most important culture-building phrases is “remember when?” It’s important that we take time to remember our history. It might be a time when a staff member got stuck in the basket of a “cherry picker” machine, and we all had a good laugh. Or a time when we overcame a massive challenge.

“Remember When’s” are important culture-builders because they capture culture defining empowering moments.

Right now, in my office, I have a bucket filled with what looks like junk. It’s not junk, it’s history. There’s a piece of sheet rock from our old modular [the old children’s ministry building]. There’s also a piece of concrete core pulled from the new building. On the wall, I have a registration sheet framed with the first fifty children checked into the children’s ministry on the opening day of the new kid’s building. You can also see framed pictures of the first seven annual themes that we used to train our children’s ministry volunteers.

You also need to guard the health of your ministry. If you see a bad attitude, you need to go right after it. Recently I had too many staff members that weren’t getting along. They started out antagonizing each other and then went to not talking each other. I had to set them in my office and facilitate reconciliation. You can’t let this stuff go on unchecked.

Larry: How do you go about getting your staff and volunteers to take ownership in your culture?

Craig: I’d change that word “ownership” to “empowerment.”

It’s like bowling. You tell your volunteers that they will be bowling in Lane 9. You don’t get to choose the values, mission, or curriculum of the children’s ministry. Those decisions are what make up Lane 9—and they’ve already been determined. But you give your volunteers freedom to bowl within that lane. You give them the ability to make decisions on how to knock the pins down. You need to give your volunteers freedom to execute with a defined set of values.

Larry: What percentage of your workweek is involved in cultural architecture?

Craig: Not that much any more. Now I have a team that propagates the culture. But the first six years I was at Saddleback I was obsessed with the culture.

The first three years were very hard. I changed the music, several leaders, the curriculum, and a lot of “how” and “why” of children’s ministry—you know, those iconic things that no one wants to see messed with.

“I actually had one parent tell me that they prayed that I would come under attack from Satan—that I would be the demise of children’s ministry at Saddleback.

To change a culture that is engrained takes an awful lot of octane. The first year I was at Saddleback I listened. The second year, I rolled out the plan. The third year, we began to execute that plan. It took an amazing amount of octane to change the culture of this ministry.

You have to be so careful with your culture. It’s like golf. You can control your swing, but once the ball leaves takes off—it’s over. There’s nothing more that you can do but watch. It takes more octane to redo a culture than it does to build it right the first time.

Since those days, Craig left Saddleback and went on to expand his business Empowering Kids .

Today, we’ll have one of Craig’s ministry partners, Joe McGinnis, review Lead the Way God Made You at his website, Family Regeneration. Be sure to enter his contest for a chance to win a copy of Lead the Way God Made You.

Lead the Way God Made You, Day 2: “Sometimes the First Idea is Not the Best Idea”

Here’s a piece of trivia I’ve never shared with anyone. The theater analogy that runs throughout the book. That wasn’t my first idea. My editor, Mikal Keefer, and I knew that we needed some hook to add interest to the book. We saw the personality theory that used four animals to help explain the different personality types. We needed something like that to keep the exploring six leadership styles fresh.

I kicked ideas around until I arrive at… super heroes! Each leadership style would be a different super hero, each with a different super power. This would work. I ran to my keyboard and typed a hurried email to Mikal.

Mikal’s reply? Laughter, followed by a request for my real idea.

I finally landed on the theater metaphor as I watched one of my volunteers lead a big and diverse team to produce a kids’ musical. I realized I had all the leadership metaphors I needed, plus the ability to weave narrative throughout the book that would connect all the chapters.

It worked. But I still like the super hero idea.

Today we visit Barbara Grave’s blog. Be sure to enter her contest for a chance to win a copy of Lead the Way God Made You.

The “Lead The Way God Made You Blog Tour” Opens!

Lead the Way God Made You is 5-year-old. To celebrate, we’re sending the book on a blog tour where you’ll meet 11 cutting edge leaders who’ll give their review. Each reviewer will give you a chance to win an autographed copy of Lead the Way God Made You.

We’ll open the blog tour with an interview I did for Lead the Way God Made You with Jim Wideman. Ten years ago Children’s Ministry Magazine recognized Brother Jim as one of the pioneers of children’s ministry. This summer, when the magazine revisits this theme, I expect Jim’s name to still  be there.

Here’s 30 good minutes with Jim:

• Where do visions come from?

Jim: My senior pastor just said in a sermon that “I don’t have a great vision. A great vision has me.” I love that. You know, when I started out, I didn’t know any other children’s pastors. I didn’t have a budget to go to a workshop. I was forced to get my vision by going to God and saying, “What in the world do you want me to do?” If you do that, God will show you something that isn’t happening in other churches.

• Can you give me an example of a vision that has you?

Jim: When I started out, some things were frustrating me at the church where I was serving. Why was the Annual Meeting the least populated event on the church calendar? Why was it that when it came time to elect deacons, that we held a popularity contest instead of electing the people who were already “deking”?

Then I realized the answer to my own question: No one trained these people as children to do these jobs when they were children!

Look at Samuel: Everything that Samuel did for God as an adult, he learned as a kid. As a child he learned how to hear a tough message from God and deliver it to the right person. That’s all that Samuel did with his adult life and he learned it as a child.

So my vision was to find out how the adult serve in the church and to give kids hands on training when they were young. We have children serving as ushers, greeters–you name it.

• What would you tell a novice children’s ministry leader, just setting out to develop their visionary leadership skills?

Jim: Great visions come from finding a need and meeting it, seeing a hurt and healing it. Tommy Barnette of the L.A. International Dream Center said that every great city needs a great church. I’d add that every great church needs a great children’s ministry. If you will be the type of person who will see a need and meet it, your church will be full.

Find out what the needs of your kids are. Take them on a weekend retreat. Get to know them by hanging out with them. Give them a questionnaire to figure out their interests and needs. What cartoons do they watch? What percentage of those kids are dealing with their parents’ divorces? What’s important to your kids? That’s where your vision is going to come from.

Early in my ministry I moved from a blue collar church in Birmingham, Alabama to a “yuppie” church in Montgomery, Alabama. When I made the move, I tried to bring a club program based on scouting with me. It didn’t work.

One kid put it like this, “You want me to put down my computer to learn how to sharpen an axe?”

• So you can’t take some visions with you from one church to the next?

That’s right. I couldn’t even shop the same way. At that blue collar church I’d by off-brand pop to save some money for my kid’s events. I bought the same thing at the yuppie church. I actually had a child approach me and ask if the church was experiencing financial problems, because if the church was in a hard place, he’d donate some money to buy some brand-name pops.

In fact, a big source of vision is find out what’s in going on “in the house.” Your job as an associate is to give your senior pastor what he wants. Senior Pastors are called to people groups and communities. Associate Pastors are called to make the Senior Pastor’s vision happen. That’s a huge source of vision.

The tour officially opens with a review by Matt Guevera, one of the visionaries behind the book What Matters Now. Here’s his review.

Lead the Way God Made You Blog Tour Launches in One Week

Lead the Way God Made You is five-years-old this year. I’m celebrating with a blog tour that launches Monday, June 28. You be treated to eleven leaders who’ll provide their review of the book. For eleven days each of these leaders will provide you with a chance to win a copy of Lead the Way God Made You. And each day, I’ll post a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the book, or one of the interviews found inside, such as Jim Wideman commenting on vision, Craig Jutila’s thoughts on culture creating.

One of my hopes for the book, and this blog tour, is that we’ll all be reminded that God doesn’t expect us to be “super leaders.” We were never designed to carry the weight of our organizations alone. Each of us only has a few of the possible leadership voices available, and we all need to operate out of a community of leadership.

I hope you’ll join us next week as we explore leadership, freed from the expectations of having to be rock stars.

Creative Tension Four: Expertise and Incarnation

Here’s the final creative tension that I think we can see in the Biblical account of Creation. It’s a similar to the other tension, but it goes several steps further. We can see this tension in the opening paragraphs of John. In just a few paragraphs we see Jesus creating the universe in concert with God the Father. Jesus is “the word.” I have a friend who grew up in Puerto Rico and learned to read the Bible in Spanish. He told me that John 1:1 is translated “In the beginning was the verb.” Jesus was the “active voice” of God, the person who drove the plot of our story into existence. But at the end of the paragraph, something unexpected happens. Jesus verbs himself into his own creation. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

There’s a sense as creative people were we need to maintain distance from our art. Last week I wrote about the emotional distance we need from our work. I think we need some intellectual distance as well. We need to become serious students of a disciple that’s bigger than whatever it is we are working on. If we are marshalling creativity to increase our leadership capacity, then we need to be regularly reading leadership literature and going to training that will sharpen us. Last year I released that if  I wanted to grow as a writer that I need to increase my intake of good books. I’ve been focusing on Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald. My goal is to read all of the major works and then read them again. My hope is that I’ll experience that “true sentence” that Hemingway wrote about until I come to know it when I write one.

I think this is why I love jazz. Jazz artists have reverence for the artists who went before them. There’s a canon of wrote that gets referred to and improvised from.

There’s wisdom, a logos, to which every artist must submit. Only then, can a person grow in their own creativity.

But then there’s Incarnation. An artist must become insuperable from what it is they are trying to create.

Last year our church got involved in build for ABC’s Extreme Home Makeover. We worked on the home of an incredible woman, Claire, who had dedicated her life to help the children on her blighted block. She provides meals and tutoring for kids that few others care about. When the show aired a bunch of us got together to watch it together.  The episode ended and the lights came on as the credits rolled. I looked around and was comforted that everyone else’s eyes were wet. We hugged each other and reminded each other about the Scriptures that we were being Jesus’ hands and feet. Through our actions Jesus had visited the neighborhood and eased some of the impact of their poverty. We returned to our cars and minivans and returned to the comfort of our suburban homes.

As I drove home I wondered what would become of the neighborhood over time. Our church had made six month, one year, and two year plans to keep investing in that particular neighborhood. We had already hosted a block party and connected the neighbors with a small apostolic church a few block away. We knew this small congregation had a better chance of connecting the neighbors to Jesus than we ever could. We were just passing visitors. This wasn’t our home.

I realized in that moment that words we said to each other back at the viewing party weren’t completely true. We hadn’t brought Jesus to their block. He was already there in the form of Clara. Clara was already doing the work of Jesus and serving children and youth that nobody else had time for. She didn’t live life to get “hers.” Instead she surrounded herself with cracked sidewalks, peeled paint, the sounds of late night gun shots and police sirens. She embraced the neighborhood as it was and made it her own. She accepted this as her mission and spent her energy bringing hope to broken kids.

Clara had already embodied Jesus long before the cameras, lighting trucks, and the volunteers arrived. We weren’t being Jesus at all. We were simply bringing gifts and worship to a Savior who had moved into the neighborhood decades before. Clara taught me what it means to be incarnated into art.

Creative Tension: Transcendence vs. Immanence (Part Two)

Yesterday we looked at God’s transcendence and how we need to imitate this by not over-identifying with our art, whether that art is leadership, painting, or writing. Our worth is found in being created by God, not in our skill level of being a “lower cased creator.” We are separate and other from our art.

God is also “immanent” in how he relates to his creation.  The Apostle Paul affirms that Jesus in all things and that through Jesus all things are held together. Jesus is everywhere and he’s the glue that holds the atoms together. He is not creation, but he is intimately close to it. Creative people need the ability to lose themselves in their work. We need to allow themselves to become obsessed with whatever we are creating in the moment.

Years ago Fast Company magazine interviewed some executives at Electronics Arts. EA is a leader in the video game industry. Their goal as video game designers wasn’t just to make a game that kept a teenager’s attention while they were playing it. They wanted the teen to constantly be thinking about the game. The designers talked about how we all have “chunks” in our attention that we have to be committed to: school, work, relationships. They wanted to move into the space between those chunks.

It’s that in-between space that we need to surrender to our creative project. It means your drive time is spend ruminating about the paragraph you intend to write tomorrow morning at 5 AM. You might be “dragging the bear” at work, but internally you are getting to know the characters in your book or you’re imagining a new phrasing for that jazz piece.

The tension between transcendence and immanence is this: You allow your work to consume you. But you don’t allow it to name you. Adam, I think, lived with this tension. Last year I heard Donald Miller give a lecture on story and conflict. He pointed out that Adam’s naming of the animals was not a weekend project. In fact it probably took him hundreds of years. He told us that Wired Magazine interviewed a guy who as working on naming all the living species. He estimated that it would most likely take three generations to complete the task, so he’d have to pass the baton eventually. Adam needed to be able to throw himself in to his work if he was ever going to name all the animals. But he couldn’t like the project name him– the job was too big and too oppressive. Adam would need to detach if he were to enjoy Sabbath. He’d need to remember and enjoy who it was who named him.

So here’s my question to you: Are you better at imitating transcendence or immanence?

Creative Tension Three: Transcendence vs. Immanence (Part One)

We’ve been looking at tensions that we find in the Biblical account of creation and seeing if we can’t embody these conflicts to make ourselves more creative. Canvas is of no use to a painted until it’s stretched out on a frame. The fabric has to be taut before its ready to receive pigment and brush strokes. Studying the tensions in Creation is nothing like trying to hammer out some magic formula to increase creativity. It’s an act of worship to see who God is like and trying to imitate that. We make our wobbly attempts to stretch our lives on the frame of his character and it changes us. We take shape and become a space where creativity can happen.

In that spirit, let’s look at the third creative tension. Theologians like to talk about God’s transcendence and his immanence when they look at creation. When they talk about God’s transcendence, they mean to say that God isn’t just the biggest created thing. He’s something completely different and separate from the created order. This concept is completely different from many of the Greek gods who found themselves brought into the world, often through the irresponsible trysts of other gods. These gods were worshiped because they were the biggest fish in the pond. But they were still fish and and they were part of the pond.

That’s not at all how God is described in the Bible. He is eternal and without beginning. And he is separate from the created order. This is important. Those offspring of Zeus didn’t have control of the world around them. They had no say as to what the force of gravity would be or whether grass would be green or beige.   They could influence the pre-established forces of nature with their superhuman powers. But they did not establish the laws of physics or design the elements in the periodic table. The God of the Bible on the other hand made all of those choices and then brought the universe into being. At the end of the day, God was not bound by anything other than his own nature to create. If God had not made a single atom, he would still be.

I think one of the hardest things to do as a creative person is to take a step back and separate my identity from what I create. I am not the sum of my sentences, paragraphs, or royalty checks. I am not the sum of my flow charts, leadership initiatives, or performance evaluations. I am different from what I create. If I could remember this truth I think I would be less jealous over the success of others. In 2005, two Christian books were released, both with a marketing budget of less than $1,000.  One book went viral and became a New York Times best seller. The other book tanked. I know because I wrote it. I wasted a lot of time being jealous over that other author. I pouted, cursed my luck, and rehearsed how unjust the universe was. The truth is that the other book, The Shack, was compelling, well written, and the author worked his fanny off promoting it. But I had wrapped up too much of my identity in my writing to see that in the moment.

When I have a health sense of detachment from my work, I’m also more open to criticism. When I first started out as a writer I remember how indignant I felt whenever an editor marked up my work or seriously hated one of my arguments. I’d tell myself that the editor was too young and would get it when he experienced puberty. I’d relish in the injustice of it all because I tied up too much of my identity in my work.

But when I remember that I am made in God’s image, and like God, I am different than my work I am free to celebrate the success of other authors. I am open to critique. And I’m free to edit and revise with a wanton drive, because my work is not me.

Next: Immanence

Joy vs. Focus, Part Two

Yesterday, I wrote how joy is the bubbly optimism that multiplies new ideas. Joy is mental fertilizer that makes all things grow. It’s the bounce in the artist’s step. But there’s a second emotional state that must accompany joy and that’s the ability to be focused.

Consider creation. We were surprised to learn that the week of creation was festive. But we also see a God acting with steely focus. There’s an unrelenting rhythm in that poem. God marks time with the announcement of a new day, a new act of creation, and a new declaration of it’s goodness.

God is driven by a goal. I’m badly paraphrasing Bishop Wright again, but God is designing the earth to be a crucible into which he will pour his love. Elsewhere, Wright adds that long before humanity built its temples and synagogues, the account of creation is that God was designing earth to be the meeting place between himself and humanity. God was creating with purpose.

Someday God would tell Abraham to leave Ur to seek an unnamed land. Abraham would need help navigating his way through the mid-eastern night. Moses wrote in Genesis 1 that God hung the stars as a sign. God lovingly laid the Zodiac across the night sky to help his some day pilgrims take steps of faith in the dark. A star would help pagan priest travel to Judea where they would worship God the toddler. In the beginning, God’s focus was that his straying children would be able to look at creation and find their way home.

The Greeks call this focus on an end goal “teleos.” It’s the “why” or the inevitable conclusion over every enterprise. Business and values guru, Stephen Covey, would call this beginning with the end in mind. For us finite creators, being goal oriented has an emotional by-product– intense focus.

Artists, leaders, and every creative type (all humans) all have to learn to experience Joy and Focus simultaneously if we want to maximize our inventive potential. I have a friend who tends to bonsai trees as a hobby. I’m no green thumb, but the best I can tell he gives his trees two type of attention. He nourishes the tree with water, light, and fertilizer, accelerating growth. Then he prunes the bush, removing growth. I’m currently raising three sons with my wife and have a dog. Quite frankly, that’s all the life for which I want to be responsible. I don’t get David’s hobby. With all the fertilizing and pruning, I’m tempted to ask David if he wants the plant to grow or not.

The truth is that David needs the tree to grow rapidly so he has excess branches. He needs to be able to remove branches in order to trim the tree into the shape he’s already imagined. I think this is true of any creative process. We all need to disciplined in the art of joy since exuberance helps provides an abundance of ideas. Joyful artists are wasteful. They create ideas, sketches, paragraphs, brainstorms, and strategies knowing that the overwhelming majority of them will never see daylight. And this foreknowledge  is okay with them, because they are focused on a future goal: an injustice needing righted, a book needing finished, or a marriage needing strengthened.

Creative Tension Two: Joy vs. Focus

Yesterday, we discussed the two paces of creativity and discovered that we experience time in different ways in different phases of the creative process. I think that there are two emotional states that maximize creativity. But I think truly creative people learn how to embody both of those states at the same time:

Joy: The book of Job is not a feel good Summer read. It’s a volume filled with suffering, soul searching, and some wondering if God is moral enough to be worshiped. However, God eventually speaks to Job and overpowers his complaints with a series of unanswerable questions about creation. God’s point to Job is that if you are so ignorant about the in’s and out’s of creation why are you surprised that you don’t have a complete understanding about the world’s moral order. During God’s interrogation of Job, he reveals a detail about creation that isn’t mentioned in either account of creation in Genesis: “the morning stars sang together and the angels shouted with Joy.”

I used to think that the act of creation was like a somber, military ceremony. God spoke in a low authoritative voice and then stuff would appear in silence. God announced that it was good and that was that. But that’s not how God said he operated. Creation is carnival. The entire universe was saturated with God’s effervescing personality. The Milky Way dripped with mirth. Day by day, the contagious joy–Chaos’ emotional antimatter— coated the earth, sealing it from decay.  In fact, theologian John Piper suggests that this Joy was nothing less than the manifestation of the Holy Spirit.

In her book “Exuberance: The Passion for Life”, Kay Redfield Jamison points out that the word “exuberance” has fertility and expansiveness in it’s original meaning. The word was originally used in agricultural settings to describe an abundant harvest. Throughout her book, Jamison makes the argument that there is a strong correlation between positive emotion and creativity. She argues that exuberance promotes creativity, risk taking, and the ability to connect two unrelated ideas. Joy makes a mind fertile with ideas.

When I first started tae kwon do training, one of the hardest disciplines I had to learn was to ability to stay light on my feet when fighting. Tae kwon do emphasizes speed over power, so our instructor taught us to constantly bounce on the balls of your feet—whether you felt like it or not. So we’d do footwork drills until our calves burned with fatigue.

There’s a funny thing about bouncing in place; you can’t do it without cracking a smile. Sometimes I’d sneak a peek at the room and see twenty five otherwise normal adults bouncing in place. We all looked foolish.

But that “foolishness footwork” is the foundation of being a fighter. Bouncing makes you relax, even when you are facing someone bigger or stronger than you. And your movements all flow out of your bounce. The bounce allows you to strike faster and harder. Countermoves and traps all spring from your ability to maintain perpetual motion.

Just try to neglect your footwork in an attempt to deliver a crushing blow, or to catch your breath. Your opponent will capitalize on your flat-footedness and clock you.

Creativity has its own footwork that you and I need to adopt in order to be “fertile”, expansive, and abundant in our endeavors: Joy. Forgive my loose paraphrase of the prophet Nehemiah.

“The bounce of the Lord is your strength.”

This post is long enough. Tomorrow I’ll post about “focus” and how creativity is maximized when we embraced both emotions at once.

Creative Tension One: The Two Paces of Creativity

I’ve noticed that the creative process demands two different paces of work. Early on in the creative process, whether its at homewriting or in the office doing church work, there’s the idea gathering phase. I’m collecting and reading books, surfing the Internet, and then mulling over what I’ve read. This phase of work requires acres of leisure, you simply can’t rush it.  I read a creativity book years ago where the author called this the “composting” phase. Time is needed for the ideas to break down and mix together to concoct something altogether new. The metaphor of composting reminds us that the process is organic and takes as long as it takes.

I think this is the favorite phase of most creative people. It is for me. I get to sip good coffee and listen to Miles Davis in the background. I wear soft T-shirts and skip shaving in the morning. I’m working, but it feels a bit like a sabbatical.

But there’s that other, more demanding pace of creativity where we have to strain to drag an idea out of the realm of dreams into the world reality. I have a friend who hunts bear every Fall in the forests of Pennsylvania. He and his friend trudge miles into the woods, climbing hills and crossing streams. The hunting trip isn’t over when the bear is shot. A black bear carcass can weigh upwards of 500 pounds and it must be dragged for miles over rough country back to the car. Its hard work.

I have a friend who I think is one of the most creative people I ever met. She’s on the staff of a church and she was leading her co-workers to adopt a new database. She navigated the “cultivating” stage of creativity well enough. She researched databases and convinced leadership to purchase the right tool. But purchasing the database was just the start of the creative process. I remember her telling me how frustrated she was with all the meetings, the trainings, and cajoling her coworkers to take this seriously. She was frustrated that she wasn’t able to spend time on the creative aspects of her job.  The truth is that she was being creative. She was dragging her bear through the woods, finishing the creative process.

These two paces are incompatible with each other. I can’t be bothered with “dragging the bear” when I’m trying to cultivate a new idea. When I’m editing a chapter or recruiting a team, it’s distracting and even annoying to be presented with a blank slate. I’ve trying to be a “balanced” person and give each side of the process equal time, but I find that I end up not doing justice to either phase.

When you look at the accounts of how God created in Genesis, you see rhythm instead of balance. God worked six days and rested on the seventh. Of course, creating the universe hadn’t depleted God. He was showing his creative image bearers a sustainable rhythm for creativity. Open the creative process with restful cultivating. Gather and enjoy ideas and information. Eat well. Rest. Worship. Invent. Then work. The period of work might end up being six times as long as it took you to dream the idea. Toil: Outline, edit and do it again. Recruit, execute, and evaluate.  And then do it all over again.

What do you think?

Which pace of creativity do you naturally gravitate towards?

Are you more comfortable with aiming to a balanced person, or a person living within a rhythm?

Page 7 of 8« First...«45678»