with Bob Condly

What a Miracle Can Teach You About Creativity

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Jesus does amazing things, but always with a purpose. The feeding of the 5000 ranks as one of His most celebrated miracles; all four gospel writers record it. (Here are the accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.)

Christ had been teaching crowds of people for a while and eventually, it was past mealtime. But nobody had any food. Except for one boy’s lunch: five loaves of bread (like flatbread or pita) and two fish. Yet that was all Jesus needed. His disciples, confused but obedient, followed the Lord’s instructions and organized the assembled into clusters of about fifty each. Then Christ prayed, broke the bread and fish into pieces, and gave them to the twelve who in turn, handed them out to the hundred or so groups. People got more than a snack; they got dinner! They ate until they were full, but there was still food left over; twelve baskets to be precise.

Why did the Lord work this miracle? What did He have in mind?

Well, He met an immediate need. People were hungry and the situation was urgent. Christ had nourished their hearts with His teaching; now, He would tend to their bodies. You could even say that Jesus rewarded them for being a good audience!

But He intended something else, too. He taught His disciples about creativity. How?

The dictionary defines creativity as “the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination.” If that doesn’t warm your heart, over at Copyblogger, Demian Farnsworth curated “21 authentic definitions you’ll love,” followed by several others offered by commenters. So there are a lot of definitions out there; most people would claim to know what it looks like.

Connection lies at the heart of creativity. Brian Clark (CEO of Rainmaker Digital) refers to creativity as “combining two seemingly unrelated things.” And I believe he got this from Steve Jobs who, in a famous interview in Wired magazine, explained that “creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something . . . They were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things . . . A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem.”

What do creative people connect? Dots! In the opinion of advertising executive Lynn Power, “Dot Connecting Is the New Creativity.”

And not just a few dots. Lots! Jobs insisted that the value of “very diverse experiences.” And journalist Maria Popova stresses that “in order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces and build new castles.”

So if you want to foster your creativity, keep exposing yourself to novel ideas, new experiences, and interesting people. In Connect the Dots, his book on self-education, Paul Jun quotes Sir Ken Robinson: “Creative insights often occur by making unusual connections: seeing analogies between ideas that have not previously been related. All of our existing ideas have creative possibilities. Creative insights occur when they are combined in unexpected ways or applied to questions or issues with which they are not normally associated . . . Creative thought involves breaching the boundaries between different frames of reference.

Doesn’t that describe what Jesus did? He took unrelated dots: a large crowd, a wilderness, and a boy’s lunch, and combined them creatively, even miraculously. In doing so, He showed His disciples, including us, how to think about problems and how to trust God.

Jesus wants you to “connect the dots” and release your creativity. Not only will you solve problems, you may also witness a miracle!

with Bob Condly

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