Pupil and Iris
Creating with God is like the eye’s pupil and iris collaborating together so that we can see. They are a smaller circle within the larger; scanning in unison for the new and perhaps, as yet, unseen.
One of the ways we sense our creative union with Christ is that ideas and actions will feel like us, but beyond us. There’s an energetic pulse that arises from us, but is more than we’d generate alone—like being in creative cahoots with someone much more powerful; but One who whispers rather than shouts.
As Dallas Willard suggests in Hearing God, we can have “thoughts that are our thoughts, though these thoughts are not from us. In this way… the human spirit becomes the ‘candle of the LORD.’” However, this outside influence often defers to us, never overriding us. In other words, a partnership of mature persons who respect each other.
How this shows up in my own process:
When I listen to some of my solo piano recordings, it’s often as if I’m listening to someone else; though I know it was I who wrote and performed them.
The same is true when just the right turn of phrase shows up in my writing.
Or when I find that singular image that complements the text.
It is I performing those actions; but with a capacity that includes, but enlarges, my own.
I’m also often aware when this is not happening; or when I’m forcing something into being that is serving a reflexive purpose rather than a redemptive one.
Creative Cahoots with Outsized Results
As we’re in creative cahoots with God, there is mutual energetic input, with a creative output of outsized proportion to what the human spirit alone could accomplish. While our will matters to God more than we might think, the divine enabling of our human capacity provides rocket thrusters—empowering the already powerful “ignition system” of the human spirit.
Samuel Shoemaker, writing in 1960, says:
“Something comes into our own energies and capacities and expands them. We are laid hold of by Something greater than ourselves. We can… create things, accomplish things, that in our own strength would have been impossible… The Holy Spirit seems to mix and mingle His power with our own, so that what happens is both a heightening of our own powers, and a gift to us from outside.”
“He’s gifted them with the know-how needed for carving, designing, weaving, and embroidering in blue, purple, and scarlet fabrics, and in fine linen. They can make anything and design anything.
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In creative cahoots with God, we can make anything and design anything—lifting burdens and leaving an easier yoke.