An Artist’s Blessing

And may the sweetness of the Master our God be upon us 

and the work of our hands firmly found for us, 

and the work of our hands firmly found!

– Ps. 90.17 (Robert Alter, trans.)

We are all fallen’broken’not yet realizing our created potential. This fallenness, from which God is seeking to redeem us, is evident in every area of our lives. We don’t need to look far to see this brutal reality in ourselves, those around us, and the culture in which we swim.

As creatives, we’re constantly striving for an imagined aesthetic, a space and a quality of production that we imagine to be ideal’our best work. We seek to fail at a higher level with each outing. As a believing creative, I perceive this effort to be the search for a divine creative space’one only The Maker knows’but for which He formed humankind.

While I am painfully aware of my fallenness, I sense my fallenness most profoundly in my creative work. My ability to produce beauty and truth always falls short of what I know should be possible. I am aware there is a ceiling I cannot rise above, beyond which is a creative space we will see and experience only in the life to come. I believe we will continue our creative work in eternity, and the satisfaction we’ll experience cannot now be conceived. Our creative capability, our design in the imago Dei, and our worship will meld as one.

For now, let our work point to His. May our effort be a candle beneath His sun, a hewn leaf upon His tree, a well-wrought sentence in the epic The Maker continues to write.