Creativity

          Want to make parents swell with pride in their offspring? Tell them the kid's a creative genius.
          Creativity is the one personal attribute that doesn't have to be proven, as it is thought to be mystical, ethereal, accepted by faith. You don't have to create anything to believe you're creative; throw glops of paint onto a canvass and supportive people will hold their mouths with astonishment over your--or an ape's--creativity. Objective onlookers, however, will most likely hold their mouths only from nausea.
          Poets are creative, eh? The more unstructured the verse, the more creative is the poet, right? And the more cryptic the meaning, the deeper is the poet's genius, for sure! That explains the term, "starving poet." John Q. Public isn't discriminating enough to appreciate--and buy--such a creative genius's stuff.
          Fiction authors need to be creative in conjuring their characters, settings, dialogs, stories, and even their unique voices, right? Since publishers consider maybe one out of a hundred submitted manuscripts, and from those considered, one out of a hundred gets published, and from those published, one out of a hundred sells enough to make a profit, and from those profitable novels, one out of a hundred becomes a best-seller ... where was I? Oh yes, since maybe one in a million submitted manuscripts demonstrates the secret combination of skill, creativity, perseverance and luck enough to make it through the publishing labyrinth to commercial success, where does that leave the 999,999 other writers? It leaves them with me, eking out a living at Target. Are they creative? Sure! But that obviously isn't enough to make great things happen.
          When God created the physical universe, He sort of winged it. Until it came time to create Adam. For man, God wanted a perfect pattern, and He didn't have to look beyond Himself for that perfection. Genesis 1:26-27 And God saith, `Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness, and let them rule over fish of the sea, and over fowl of the heavens, and over cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that is creeping on the earth.' (27) And God prepareth the man in His image; in the image of God He prepared him, a male and a female He prepared them.
          So even God had to rely on something beyond creativity when the stakes were high. He looked to the only perfect pattern, the only structure worthy of emulation: Himself. In our creative endeavors, we must learn from God's example: Creativity is great, but come crunch time, the standards, the conventions, the rules won't let you down.