Lots of Muddled Fragments

There are lots of muddled fragments going around inside my head, probably enough for several blog posts. But right now they are just kind of disjointed and fragmented.  So don’t be surprised if this blog post doesn’t amount to much. 🙂

The best way I can describe the way I feel is an odd combination of inspiration, concern, hope and regret–and those feelings can follow one another within a matter of seconds. There’s a churning of the waters deep inside, I think. Part of it, I suppose, is that on the advice of several people (The Wild One, most of all), I have finally begun working my way through a very popular book for creative souls, The Artist’s Way. While admittedly there is a mixture there with the spiritual aspects of it (which I knew going into it), there’s a lot of truth in it about how creativity gets blocked.  The book warns that it is liable to stir up a lot of emotion as you start working through it. While I haven’t been devastated (yet), I have felt some deep stirrings and have been processing some feelings long buried.  What surprises me is that a lot of the negative emotions I’m feeling are connected to things not really associated with creativity–but even processing these thoughts now, I think it must somehow be related to working through the book.  I’m churning the waters inside, and the discomfort is flowing into other areas.

Let’s see if I can grab one of these muddled fragments and work through it a bit.

I worry sometimes about my creative journey, and how it ties in to ministry and mission.  I think that despite all the deconstruction I’ve gone through, I still seem to compartmentalize in this area. I have been so programmed to see ministry as taking a certain shape and form–a box to fit my musical gifts into–that I have a hard time on a soul level seeing that my art and my ministry are intertwined, part of the same journey. Let me try to unpack that.

When my musical gifts became evident as a youngster in the church, I heard a lot of admonitions from people to “use my gifts for God.” What that really meant, in our collective mindset, was to use the gifts in the church, or to preach the gospel, or something overtly Christian in scope and message. When I coupled that with the calling I felt to “the ministry” as a teenager, a picture formed of this framework of ministry within which I was to use my gifts.  I spent many years with this mindset, and it helped describe and define what I thought was my “place.”

It was a couple of years ago during a conversation with my family that my mindset first began to change–in fact, I documented it here on the blog. Rather than rehashing it, let me quote the excerpt where the moment of truth happened:

I said something to this effect: “All this time, because of our mindsets, the ministry has been the priority, and we’ve been trying to submit our gifts to the cause of ‘ministry’, instead of….”

The Director finished it for me: “…instead of letting the gifts BE the ministry.”

It was the first time I’d seen my artistic gifts and the ministry as integrated rather than two separate entities…and it’s a mindset-switch I’m obviously still grappling with.

The problem with seeing the gift and the ministry as separate entities is that inevitably you begin to see them as conflicting elements, and you must choose which one must take precedence over the other.  With me, ministry came first, so creative endeavors had to fit into that box or be discarded. It was a subtle way of self-stifling, or laying down your dreams for the sake of Jesus and the gospel (a concept I think has done a great deal of damage in the church–after all, Who gave us the dreams in the first place???).

Even knowing this in my head, I think the idea that my gifts and ministry are integrated is still working its way into my soul, and hasn’t quite arrived.  The reason I think this is that I often fight a lot of self-doubt when it comes to the journey I’m on right now. I know deep within that I’m supposed to be in a season for nurturing my own creativity, but I feel guilty about it–like I’m somehow laying down the ministry in order to do it.  Like because I’m not out doing some visible, publicly-viewable thing, somehow I’m forsaking the ministry in favor of selfishly pursuing my own thing.

Again, it’s a wrongful compartmentalizing: choosing ministry OR creativity. I know logically this mentality is baloney.  It isn’t what I think; but it is what I feel, and what I’m grappling with right now.

That’s just one of the many muddled fragments in my brain.  But I’ve let you scope around in my head long enough.  Time to let some of this stuff gel a bit before I bring it out here on the blog. 🙂

You’re welcome.