On Saturday I had the privilege to share a morning devotional for the Board of Directors at SpringHill Camps where I serve as the Retreats Director. Here is what I shared:
I wish I had them to show you: notebook after notebook with pages marked off into 3-inch squares, a doodle in every one of them. One hundred different logos for a fictitious company. A hundred variations on a magazine cover. A hundred concepts for a car that would never be built. One hundred ways to create the letter A in type.
My freshman graphic design professor, Mr. Andrus, if he taught us one thing, it was that the best idea never came before the hundredth idea.
The creation account in Genesis, tells kind of the same story, doesn’t it.
A hundred water formations: ice, rivers and streams, ponds and puddles, lakes and seas, oceans and droplets, vapor and downpours.
And then a hundred ferns. A hundred flowers. A hundred trees. A hundred vines. A hundred kinds of fruits, and a hundred kinds of vegetables. It’s good.
A thousand variations on lights in the sky: stars, planets, moons, solar systems in endless varieties of swirl and twist and mass. Good, but there must be something better, right?
So today a hundred fish. A thousand crabs. A gajillion varieties of things that swim, and a gagillion varieties of things that fly. Birds of every shape and size. Birds that fly and birds that run. Birds that sing, and birds that hum.
Then a hundred animals with hooves. A hundred with feet. Some two feet, some four. Animals with fur and scales. He made some with paws and claws. Some he made to live alone, some to live in packs and herds.
More varieties and kinds and colors and shapes than we could imagine, but God wasn’t done. He had one more idea. Something that would stand apart from all the others. All of these other ideas, they were good ideas.
Take a walk on one of our trails today—I work here, and there are honestly days I never make it out of my cubicle—so after your meeting, take a walk without your phone, put on some mosquito repellant, and marvel at the vastness of God’s creation. And then I want you to hear this: His best idea was none of that. His best idea was you.
Genesis 1:26-31, “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground. ”
29 Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food. ” And it was so.
31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning —the sixth day.
So I don’t know what challenge you may be facing in your life. I don’t know what thing at home, or what thing you’ll talk about today in this meeting that will require you to come up with a creative solution.
Too often my tendency is to the first, or one of the first ideas I come up with. And in the end, that may be the best idea, but if we don’t give ourselves the opportunity to consider or even think of others, we may never know.
When our staff is thinking of stage games or skits, they often get attached to their early ideas, those seeds of creativity. But I often challenge them and their attachment. That attachment is the enemy of the best ideas, those yet to be spoken, or sketched, or doodled or created.
So I send them back to their notebooks with questions like, “What would that look like 12 feet off the ground?” or “If Nickelodeon, or Disney were doing it, or if money were no object, what would it look like then?”
God didn’t settle for an earth formless and void, he didn’t settle for vast expanses of sky and sea, or even for every beautiful thing that flies or swims and runs, he had a better idea, and it was very good.
