One of the misconceptions surrounding writers is that day after day streams of endless ideas flow from our creative minds down through our fingertips so naturally and so easily as we earnestly type out our messages to the world. Believe it or not, this could not be further from the truth. Writing is hard work, and mostly a slow grid. Ernest Hemingway once commented about the craft, “…sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.” However, whether you’re a writer or not, we are all creative in some shape or form and throughout our day-to-day lives, God wants to reveal an ordinary sight so we can create an extraordinary message. 

 “What do you see?” asks God to the reluctant prophet, Jeremiah. Jeremiah tells God that he sees an ordinary almond tree. This ordinary sight starts a chain reaction of events that leads Jeremiah into his vocation and calling. God had already chosen Jeremiah as His prophet to ‘speak My word to the nations.’ (Jeremiah 1:5) This is where Jeremiah tries to talk God out of the calling He had chosen for him by telling God that He’s got the wrong guy because of his lack of credentials and how he is too young and inexperienced for the massive task ahead of him. Nevertheless, God isn’t deterred and births an extraordinary message from Jeremiah’s ordinary sight into the young prophet’s heart that sets Jeremiah on a journey toward his vocation and calling.

What about you dear, creative friend? Has God shown you an ordinary sight for an extraordinary message? Something that reveals heavenly eternal truths through the ordinary. However, like the prophet, Jeremiah, you’ve listed a number of excuses that let God know He is mistaken, that He’s chosen the wrong person for the job. 

But God doesn’t just want you to go around looking for an extraordinary message in ordinary sights just for the sake of it. He is a relational God who comes alongside you in your creative endeavours and works through an ordinary message to make it extraordinary with you. “Call to Me, and I will answer you. I will tell you of great things, things beyond what you can imagine, things you could never have known.’(Jeremiah 33:3) Great things? Beyond what we can imagine? It’s true. But to tap into those great things, the things we question, the things we wonder over, requires a relationship with the One who holds all the answers to all the things we could have never known. Communing with the Creator God of everything marvellous and wonderous is our starting point. 

God uses the ordinary to show us the extraordinary because He wants us to partner with Him. Creativity is not about tapping into a formula where we see something ordinary and then build an extraordinary message around it. As Allen Arnold says, “If we try to create by formula the art we’re creating grows stagnant and still.” God is always on the move; He is never stagnant or still and neither should our messages as believers be stale or static. If God can use our typical, familiar, normal moments to bring out His incredible, exceptional, extraordinary message about His redeeming power which will help to restore and reconnect people back into a relationship with Him, then why wouldn’t He use ordinary people like you and me to bring the message of the gospel to a world that is looking for an extraordinary message! 

Wendy xo 

Have you felt too ordinary to bring an extraordinary message into existence by partnering with God?

I pray that today you will take some time to sit with God, and let Him remind you in the pages of His Word how He uses ordinary people to live extraordinary lives.