Creating from the Hard Places

I’m in a women’s class at my church on Thursday mornings. We’re studying the book Waking Up Grey, which is all about waking up your creativity. As I sat in class last week, I looked around and noticed several women crying. They were just sitting there, letting tears run down hardly wiping them away. They looked like the broken kind of tears. You know what I’m talking about? The times that you cry at little to no prompting but you can’t stop it because you just feel mushy inside and like nothing is working and you’re questioning everything? Who you are, what you’re doing. Seriously, am I headed anywhere in this life? That kind of crying.

I’m not a big public crier but even I have teared up in this class while sharing parts of my story. Last week as I looked at the other women crying, I wondered why we all felt the need to take this class on creativity in our broken states of self. Why do we feel the need to create out of brokenness?

I posed this question to my sister and her/our friend who stayed with me over the weekend. My sister made a really good point: Creating your art takes a ton, like, all the vulnerability you can muster, and when you’re in a broken phase of life, you are at your most vulnerable.

I lived in denial of my own brokenness for a long while, until I was 26 years old. Then, I went through a hard time. It was similar to other hard times I’ve had in which I was trying to fix my problem by doing and remaining busy. I went home for Christmas in the middle of this and during our Christmas Eve service at my home church, my other sister (I have very wise sisters) leaned over to me and said something simple that changed it all. She said I didn’t have to be strong anymore. That I didn’t have to hold it together and I could just rest in God’s lap, take a deep breath and rest.

That was it, the beginning of my broken journey. The first time I cried broken tears was right there smack dab in the middle of the church I grew up in yet never allowed myself to be vulnerable or honest in. I cried for the rest of the service and my extended family was concerned and people were looking at me funny because it’s Christmas and everyone is happy but God was breaking me and I couldn’t stop the tears.

Coincidentally, or not coincidentally, this was when the desire that I’ve always had to write began to overwhelm me. So much so that I knew, finally, writing was what I needed to pursue in a serious way and not in a dabble-y kind of way. Many of the women in my creativity class are feeling this overwhelming desire too, though, to different degrees of seriousness. This is completely fine because creating is something we all must do whether we’re making money at it or not. Creating is spending an afternoon decorating your living room as much as it is writing a book. It’s making a card for a friend and it’s performing spoken word poetry.

I think I have so much more to learn on this creating out of brokenness thing. What I’m seeing in it now is that creating is best and most natural when it comes from the vulnerable state and true vulnerability isn’t possible until you’ve felt that broken mushy feeling on the inside, until you’ve realized that you are indeed nothing and can do nothing outside of Christ. It can make us feel so weak, but I think what can come out of it is stronger than anything we create from a place of certainty and confidence. Rather than waiting for the brokenness to subside, use it, and see what comes out.

A note: Hey guys! Because of some exciting writing things happening (which I will tell you about as soon as I can), I’m going to be re-posting some of my favorite blogs for the next few weeks until that project is done. This is a post, originally titled “Why We Create Out of Brokenness,” that might help those of you have who are hoping to create more in 2016.