A gifted teacher, friend, and fellow Hope*writer, Mara Eller, (@mara.eller) recently posted about being willing to look into the darkness of our lives as a source for deep creativity. She closed with:
"God invites each one of us to join in the eternal dance of transformation—of creation—and we have powerful tools at our fingertips, whether with paint or flowers or food or words.
So the question becomes, are you brave enough to venture into the dark?
I cannot wait to see what you create."
It is true that creatives often delve into struggle, their own and that if others, to bring the truth of both pain and redemption.
In my own journey, having finally dared to acknowledge hints of light after a relentlessly bleak season, I flipped her question and responded:
“The question used to be: am I brave enough to come out of the dark?
After flinching at relentless life for so long, it's been a struggle to dare to hope that light or joy could be trusted. To risk disappointment. To grind through to caring enough to reach for anything good. To try my voice again.
I've been willing to hold space for myself in the dark. To not look away or hurry. Right now others are calling out the new light they see in me and I'm leaning into that one day at a time—God's deep, healing, creative work on the inside—to inform new courage.
So, am I brave enough to mine what the dark taught me? To believe that it's wrought anything good? And to believe that I can paint with words in a way that speaks presence, compassion, hope, and redemption into another's darkness?”
Where are you in the journey, fellow creatives? Fellow travelers?
We can respond to hard events and seasons by running or by turning to face them—to receive them—being present to our own pain and acknowledging the need for comfort, help, and rest. For time to breathe, understand, and grow up, up, up through the crust of the crushing. Our hearts expanded in true empathy.
We can be the ones who don’t rush in to save or paste a platitude for the sake of our own comfort. But can instead linger, unafraid to sit with another’s lament, to listen deeply, to use words sparingly . . . so sparingly. To know what will be balm, and if we don’t, to gently ask or perhaps, bravely, say nothing at all.
And if we fashion stories, poems, paintings, songs . . . ?
With broken, gentle, weathered hands, we can touch souls with prayers of color, texture and melody, with light, allegory and humor. We can remind the weary that both joy and sorrow are the way of all travelers, but the joy . . . oh, the joy!
We hold God's creative grace, a life-gift to be shared.
Oh, that we would bravely dig deep of our sufferings, where the seeds of our redemption awaited their spring, and now testify to tenacious life and hope, scarred and beautiful.
