I pastor a church chock-full of artists.  You can't throw a rock into the congregation and not hit someone working on a book or an album or a watercolor or a quilt or a fusion restaurant or an organic garden.  I was a playwright before I was a pastor.  Our first hire after me was a singer/songwriter, theatre director and award-winning playwright.  Our next hire had been a TV actress.  Half a dozen folks in the last few years have released CDs.  Two just opened for Jason Mraz.  One provided the cover for a Grisham book.  One just sang the national anthem at Fenway.

And yet there's a dark side.  In less than a news flash, let me be the first to tell you that artists tend to be more miserable than the average Joe or Jane.  Years back, when I first started down my road of professional creativity, a helpful friend passed on a "happiness survey" of fifty great American novelists.  As I recall, not one rose above… oh, something like "near-suicidal."  Artists are more prone to divorce and substance abuse. 
So we have this paradox.  As humans, we have a mysteriously strong creative urge which, more often than not, depresses us and ruins our closest relationships (as any student of Picasso, say, would understand only too well).  That would seem to be the opposite of what we should expect from natural selection.

Those with a theological bent have an interesting take on this.  They note that the very first chapter of the Bible tells us that we're "made in the image of God," and that the only thing we've learned about this God at that point of the story is that he creates stuff.  They also note that people are immediately commanded to multiply this image throughout the earth-a command that clearly could mean a number of things from procreation to evangelism.  But what if it's also talking about creation as being right at the heart of our essence and our calling?

So maybe it's not surprising that, in the Western tradition at least, you could make a case that the greatest flowering of art came through dedicated church people until the Reformation and the modernist movement mucked things up by making us a bit heady and iconoclastic and tortured.  But for those who were in churches largely spared that legacy (I'll include Anglicans here to make my case), creativity continued at a dizzying clip.  Flannery O'Connor, CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Hugo, even, I suppose, Graham Greene are generally regarded as lasting novelists of serious faith.  (I'll skip music, painting and other arts for the moment.) 

This is not to say they escaped the artist's disease of misery, though some of these did better than others.  But it is to suggest that our innate creativity might thrive best in a surprising context.   

Several of these folks argue that this embedded creativity flourishes only when it's given to God and received back as a gift to us, as something fun on its own terms-an instinct contrary to the nature of the average artist.  Oscar Wilde famously noted that it isn't enough for artists to succeed; we need to see our friends fail.  Artists, wise people tell us, are prone to misery because we so desperately need the validation of our own specialness and unique talent.  Hemingway was great friends with Fitzgerald right up until Fitzgerald's literary reputation threatened to eclipse his own. 

Artists are also famously insecure about the inherent frivolousness of what we're up to.  No one, after all, needs to read a novel or see a movie or hear a song.  And so, in my circles, you can read endless self-serious essays on the indispensability of art.  But we can never quite convince ourselves on this point, and so depression and family disapproval soon follow. 

Yet are these great novelists right?  Can a good deal of this can be avoided if we quilt or write or compose or garden as a great gift from God to us?  None of us can handle the crushing burden of our three-minute pop song being important, much less the burden of proving to a skeptical public that we, in fact, are brilliant, once-a-century talents who must be noticed (and-it goes without saying-well-compensated). 

You, I believe, are super-creative.  And that creativity is a delightful and meaningful reminder of your more-intimate-than-you-realize connection to a creator God.  Here's to that wonderful creativity being a gift to you rather than-God forbid-a bummer.