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Creativity is natural for everyone in varying degrees, and we tend to create depending upon what is important to us. I write. Usually lyrics or music, sometimes short stories or essays. Songs and stories are the creative outlets I normally choose, but their content or intended interpretations are what best sum up my priorities. If I am not afraid to be honest or to make myself potentially vulnerable as I create, others can gain a lot of insight as to what my hopes and dreams, doubts and fears are. If I am swayed by jealous motives, deadlines or a paycheck, it could hinder authentic creativity (and that may let on to real priorities anyway). Occasionally, I will misrepresent myself through a lyric or paragraph, but it can usually be traced to a lack of focus or misaligned priority. So, from a distance, all that I create in general says a lot about who I really am and what is really important to me.
A music enthusiast, I quickly fell in love with an album introduced to me last year by an author friend of mine. As I grew impatient waiting for the artist?s next project, I decided to look on the internet for other materials he may have released prior to the album I owned. None were available, but the lyrics to many unreleased songs were offered on several sites. As I browsed the sites, it didn?t take long to see that this artist had a very unhealthy view of women and sex. Nearly every song was laced with some sort of perverted reference to his preferred sexual activities or women?s body parts. The album I owned didn?t give me that impression, but an overall view of his lyrical content including his unreleased (but not unpublished) songs spoke volumes about what was on his mind much of the time.
Today I sat down and watched a movie from a few years back called ?Wag the Dog,? starring Dustin Hoffman, Anne Heche and Robert Deniro. It?s a political film in which the presidential team (Heche and Deniro) hires a Hollywood film producer (Hoffman) to stage a fake war in order to divert attention from a breaking story about the president?s most recent sexual deviation. They successfully complete the task, diverting Americans? attention to the new war and its developments just long enough to regain the president?s approval ratings before the election. Though the film never came out and said it, you could easily tell that its creators had very specific opinions to share about how the government manipulates mainstream media to sway public opinion (meanwhile, Joe Homeowner sits comfortably in the living room of his 2 story house, his 2.3 kids playing in the backyard, his wife cooking dinner, and he watching the 6 o?clock news as if he were reading scripture, never considering how the angle taken on a story can influence his personal stance on the given issue).
The movie had originally interested me back when it was first released, but I didn?t watch it because my mom saw it first at the theater and said it wasn?t any good. I thoroughly enjoyed it today, though, as I watched, enjoying a bowl of macaroni and cheese and some peanut M & M?s. Though I do not claim to be politically minded, those kinds of conspiracy theory movies rarely fail to hold my interest.
All propaganda aside, I am fascinated by creativity, and this world is full of it.
The Food Network isn?t a channel I normally watch, but for some reason my remote control finger got tired one day and gave out on said channel, leaving me to watch a documentary on how prunes are made. Forgive the pun, but I ate it up. Former Double Dare host Marc Somers taught me all about the chronology from seed to plum to prune to old people resting easy in their regularity, and I was captivated by the technology that goes into something as trivial as dried fruit.
At one point in the process, prunes are dumped onto a high speed conveyor belt and ushered under a photographic light meter which reads the color of thousands of prunes per second. The belt, pointed slightly uphill, ends suddenly, pitching the prunes to another high speed ?catcher? belt a few feet away. While the prunes are airborne, another machine shoots tiny puffs of air at the discolored prunes, knocking them out of the air into a bin where they are later collected and discarded or fed to the workers in the factory.
I wrote a song once called ?When the Tables Turn.? Each verse describes a different situation about people in need, and then is followed by a chorus that poses the question, ?Where do you go when the tables turn?? Verse three is my favorite:

Shake, shake, shake goes the coin cup
His eyes too tired to look up
And see your pockets jingle by
But you?re late, late, late and you know
Just where that precious change goes
And you hurry off to lunch before you hear his children cry

The aim of the song is not to make people feel guilty for ignoring beggars on the street, but to encourage people towards compassion and unselfishness. I believe that God has entrusted us with great wealth (both financially and creatively). When I give to someone on the street, I explain that I am giving out of the abundance that God graciously shares with me and, because God trusts me to make right choices with my money, I am extending that trust to them. Then I leave it in God?s hands. And, like me, they are held accountable for the choice they make (if we treat others with respect and dignity, they are more likely to act accordingly).
An obscure musician can spend countless hours weaving words together, laboring over each rhyme and note, crafting verse and chorus to describe his utter infatuation with the female rear end. Like a skilled marionette, Washington can ?leak? false information to the press and lead millions of American puppets to believe whatever they want them to believe, all to avoid owning up to their mistakes. And Sunsweet has technology that can photograph dried plums, select the undesirable ones, calculate the physics of their trajectory and knock them out of the assembly using tiny pin-pointed puffs of air, all in a fraction of a second. The point is that we humans were given an amazing capacity for creativity. As we have seen here, and like any good comic book will tell you, we have a choice to use that power for good or for evil; for personal gain or the benefit of others. But it requires a purposeful choice to use our God-given talents with wisdom and out of a desire to share from his abundance.