January is creativity month and so we featured a number of stories and videos on DIY projects.
We asked our Facebook fans what creative projects they’re working on. And we also recently released two new ebooks, Angel Gifts: Inspiring Stories and Angel Crafts to Nurture Your Creativity and Creativity and Personal Growth: 7 Inspiring Stories on How Crafts Can Change Your Life, both of which help us see how creative acts connect us to others, lift our spirit and strengthen our relationship to God.
How can sewing a quilt, you ask, deepen my relationship with God? Because if God is the Creator of all things then when we play an instrument, tell a story or crochet an afghan, we are emulating him. Madeleine L’Engle, author of the much beloved A Wrinkle in Time, sees it a bit differently: “To paint a picture or to write a story or to compose a song is an incarnational activity…. In a very real sense the artist should be like Mary who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command.”
“I believe,” L’Engle continues, “that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, ‘Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me.’”
Of course, we may not be Frida Kahlo or Georgia O’Keefe, but we are all artists. Our tools may just happen to be needle and thread or flour and butter; our masterpieces, quilts and cakes. What a wonderful thought: I’m sewing, dancing, painting, baking, scrapbooking, crocheting and singing myself closer to God!
