One of my favorite things that has come from working on multiple fixer uppers has been how much my creativity has grown from them. When a house already seems finished, there’s a stifling fear of failure that comes leaving little room for growth. The more work a house needs, the greater possibility for improvement. The more houses we’ve worked on, the greater appreciation I’ve had for their differences. No two are alike, and I enjoy bringing each of them to life in their own unique ways.
I wish I could take back all the times I’ve put my own rightness and perfectionism on a pedestal as though I've already reached some level of attainment, all the times I let my own pride put God and others in a box. I wish to always approach God and others out of a humility that always leaves room for growth- a realization that my Creator never makes cookie cutters and an understanding that my view of God will always be limited by my finite mind. Instead of making a God of myself thinking others should look like me, I seek to understand how their own individualities could show the stamp of my Creator on their lives.
There’s a stifling fear in religion that puts ourselves, God, and others in a box with little room for growth. A spirit of fear that causes us to leave behind our ability to operate out of power, love, and a sound mind and masks itself as wisdom and carefulness that is foolishness to God. A lofty view of myself that approaches God out of a sense of rightness and builds principalities upon my own understanding that God has to cast down in order to rebuild. Rather than approaching the living Word as a double-edged sword that penetrates my own soul and spirit, judging the thoughts and attitudes of my own heart that always has room for improvement, I’ve used it to cut down others when even angels wouldn’t dare to do such a thing. The blinding thing about rightness is that it seems so right, a force of evil that dwells in Heavenly places. It allows no room for growth as it comes from a place of completion. It doesn’t appreciate others’ differences, it seeks to make clones of His creations and accuses the very people I should seek to love and learn from.
The more I grow in my creativity and the more I grow in my identity as a creator, artist, and Christian, the more I can look at others and their talents and accomplishments and appreciate them or learn from their differences rather than seeing them as competition as we are all works in progress. However, the more projects I’m working on, the less time I have to judge another’s work as I’m too busy working on my own. There’s always room for growth and improvement here.
