Creative Prayer

God Is Not a Formula Long, long ago, our planet was shrouded in darkness. It was a mysterious chaos, a completely unordered mass of raw material. There were no plants, no seasons, no dry land, no light. "Formless and void," Scripture describes it. Shapeless and empty. Confused and meaningless. Deep and dark. Desperately lifeless. But a Spirit brooded over the deep. As a wind caressed the waters, he blew away the darkness and hovered over the surface of chaos, contemplating his design and breathing the Breath of meaning into the emptiness.2 The Hebrew word means "to hover, to move, to brood."3 His movement was a mission of fertility, and soon this formless mass exploded in creativity. The shapeless raw material became beautiful. Not long after, God formed the shape of a man out of the dust of the ground. Genesis says he breathed his own Breath into this lifeless being; face-to-face and mouth to mouth, the divine Spirit awakened humanitythe pinnacle of creation. The first sensation this new creature felt was the warm Breath of a creative God; the first thing he saw was God's face. His surroundings were already lush with life and fruit, stunning in beauty, and perfectly suited to sustain the created order. The Master had painted, sculpted, written, and orchestrated wonder and majesty into his work. The Breath that hovered, the Wind of God, was powerful, perfect, and extremely imaginative.4 Adam didn't rise up into life to see a blueprint, to hear an explanation, or to find a matrix of complex codes. He awoke to find pictures and sounds and scents and tastes, to feel the warmth of the Breath and the cool of the breeze, and to have those sensations laid out in a progression of time so he could witness the interplay of creation. This Spirit that brooded had not painted by numbers or followed an instruction manual. God thought "outside the box" in everything he did. He didn't even have a box to think outside of. God thought "outside the box" in everything he did. The first couple, we are told, had been made in the image of Godthe God whose Spirit hovered and breathed. They had been entrusted with a taste of the Creator's creativity, blessed with a reflection of his imagination. They would have the ability to create using the tools and raw materials God had given them, and there would be almost no limit to the ways they could express themselves. Why did God create people in his image? Over the course of Scripture, the answer becomes obvious. We were made in the image of God in order to relate to him. We each have a mind, a will, emotions, a voice, facial expressions, gestureseverything we need to communicate at a personal level. And, because the One we relate to is highly imaginative, we have the ability to do it creatively. But human potential took a nasty fall when the first couple gave in to temptation, and we know the tragic result. The God who made them came to them in the Gardenin "the cool of the day," most translations say, though it's literally "the Breath of the evening," in the Spirit who had hovered and exhaled life into the chaosand they hid. They had no urge to communicate, to relate to their Creator as they were designed to do. Expression turned inward as they suppressed themselves in hiding. Creativity took an ugly turn after that. We read of the son of a murderer who became the father of "all those who play the lyre and pipe." Another son of the same murderer was the father of those who forge bronze and iron.5 And for millennia, the creative breath of humanity sang music to false gods, crafted hand-carved idols, and designed offensive atrocities like the tower of Babel in an attempt to become divine. Human ingenuityTiegreen, Chris is the author of 'Creative Prayer ', published 2007 under ISBN 9781590529317 and ISBN 1590529316.