Created/Creative: Already/Not Yet

Author: David Swalley

8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.

1 Corinthians 13:8-10 (English Standard Version)

A long, long time ago, in a classroom not so far away, I sat with my chair angled up in that exact posture between letting the chair fall forward and backward. It was that magic angle that had so many parents and teachers convinced that you were going to break yourself, the chair, or both. Not me. I’d been doing this for over a decade now. I had certainly put in my 10,000 hours of chair balancing.

I had it mastered like all young men have a couple silly things mastered between the ages of 19 and 22. All you have to do is keep your center of gravity in that sweet inch or so, and you are good. Sure, you are making constant corrections, but that is the fun of it. You could be sitting there, butt on the seat, feet on the ground like some square, but what would you do!? What would you learn?! Would there be any change? No. You would sit there, only focusing on the thing you were sitting there for. Gross. Boring. Empty. Yet, that is in fact what I was doing. I was learning about tension and balance. That was the secret to the mastery of the chair. You are no master of the chair. You are in a relationship with the chair, physics, your own mind/body, and countless other things. You don’t know even a fraction of the factors that are leading you to sub-consciously make thousands of tiny decisions to keep you in the golden inch, the one where you prove the authority figure wrong by not breaking the chair or yourself. God, in his grace, gives you the ability to do this. Also, in His wisdom, gently breaks the context in which you use that ability over time.

I am pulled out of this egotistical stupor by Professor Gary Matsdorf. Who knows why this great thinker ,this exquisite theologian, this giant of a man in the Kingdom, is teaching Kingdom of God cases to a bunch of kids who plan to grow up to be lay-ministers and part time worship leaders in Billings, MT? That is exactly what is happening. It seriously felt like Nick Saban coaching a little guy football team. Surely he has mastered many chairs before he came to reveal to us this great tension. He draws on the board a flat line, an angled line that climbs 45 degrees for about 12 inches, and another flat line. There are a couple more lines, a cross and some marks in the timeline,but the most important thing is this: when he is done he circles the angled line and labels it “ALREADY/NOT YET”.

“This is the key to understanding the Kingdom of God. It is already here! Christ died and rose again! He did so to pay for your sins! The lame walk! The blind see! The good news is preached to the poor! At the same time, it is not yet here. We sin. There are the lame and the blind. The poor remain in captivity, despite the Good News of freedom. Until the second coming of Christ, the new heaven and the new earth, we are caught between these 2 things. You are redeemed, you are being redeemed. You are saved, you still sin. God is sovereign, but there is still rebellion. Rebellion in ourselves, from the enemy, and in the world.”

“Woah.”, I thought, as I let the front of my chair hit the ground.

Fast forward another decade or so. The Lord has, in his grace, allowed the arrogant young thing from the first paragraph balance many tensions, now with a wife and 2 kids on the chair as well, and, in His wisdom, has been gently revealing the context of that balance over time. Two situations in the past year have been particularly revealing of the above mentioned tension and context.

One: after serving for a literal 50% of my life(16 years, for the sake of accurate reference) on the worship team as a guitarist, I felt it was necessary to step down. It was a very hard decision. Even though now I can see God’s purpose in it, willfully giving up something you have been doing for such a long time doesn’t feel great. Sometimes it feels like a failure. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, it sometimes feels like a friend has passed. I think ”Hey, I am going to call guitarist David up and hang out!” Then, the grin slowly fades from my face as I realize that can’t happen anymore. He is gone, at least for a long season. In this grief I became really frustrated. I had no idea how much fellowship with God there was in being creative with music. I once stayed up until 3 am on a vacation with my wife because I had purchased a new piece of equipment for my guitar. Leah went to sleep around 10, and I went to the hallway, plugged in to the wall, jacked my headphones in, and started working. I could hear the tone I wanted. It wasn’t exactly the Edge, it wasn’t exactly John Mayer, it probably had existed somewhere before, but I knew it from the secret place. The place where God and I go to find those things that he whispers into my ear, and only mine. Then we laugh and grin at each other, reveling in just how beautiful it is. Then God looks at me and places his hand on the back of my head and gently indicates that I need to leave the secret place, take this with me and share it with everyone. I need to make them understand. Share the smile, the laugh, the reveling. Hopefully, it will remind them of their secret place with God, or maybe it will make them long for it if they have never been there. Maybe one of them will ask :WHERE DID YOU GET THIS?!” And I will be able to say “With God…where God is. He has a place for you! Do you want to go!? There are better things there, more things! Things forYOU! This is my thing and I will share it, but He has things for YOU! So, there I am, middle of the night, on a couch in the hallway in the Chico lodge, “Less treble; that riff was screechy. More gain; the middle of the register doesn’t have enough character. That speaker model; that’s what I would have on stage if we had room and money…maybe this is the wrong amp though…” The whole thing starts over, though this time with the knowledge of the last attempt. Finally, we are in the ballpark. I can play anywhere on the neck and it’s close. Not perfect, like it was in the place with God, but SO close. I yawn and look at the time. 3. Better sleep.

That’s a thing about creativity. I don’t think it’s ever perfect, at least not in this world. You work hard. You don’t go to bed at midnight when there is work to be done at 3. At the same time, I don’t think perfect is a thing in this life. In almost every art show, book signing, director’s commentary, documentary that I have ever engaged, the artist always has a couple things they would change in hindsight, things they wanted to do but didn’t have time or money for, etc… The point is we paint in part, and we film in part. Just a bunch of parts trying to tell the eternal story. If Stephen Spielberg still has misgivings about a couple of camera angles in Schindler’s List, then I will assume that I may go to bed at 3 on account of sleep instead of satisfaction many a late night.

Two: I am getting my physical health in check. After a long struggle with Type 2 Diabetes, a lot of weight gain, and a host of other metabolic problems that comes with that, I have been led to a dietary protocol that is effectively addressing my weight, diabetes, and all the other stuff. As things improve, I have noticed some strange things happening in my mind. Weight comes off, clothes I have not even touched for many years are within reach, some of them even wearable. I begin to feel this tension somewhere too deep describe. I start thinking things like “Ok, if I get up a little earlier, I can move more and burn more calories. If I eat less, I can get in to that perfect plaid shirt that I thought was going to stay in the museum that had been carved out in the back of the closet.” Hope began to spring up, lending to some more-than-welcome life to the barren soil that had been my mind for a long time. Right next to it, however, grew the thorns of discontentment. The progress began to lose it’s meaning for the sake of a more vain set of goals: finding my abs, wearing a large in a fashion brand, looking in the mirror and seeing something I wanted to see, and the like. Here is the essence of what is happening here: I did not go to the secret place for this revelation, because it is me we are talking about. This isn’t a photo or a painting or a song or a tone. This is my body. This is my self. Who knew you had to go to the secret place to find yourself, too? I spent a few days starving myself, wondering where my newfound energy had gone, chastising myself for not working more, working harder. You know, the 3 AM stuff(or at least my fleshly version of it). Then, I asked God what was happening. I was quietly praying one morning and I remembered the adage, “you aren’t done until you are dead”, from a sermon or a book or something like that. I heard God’s voice saying, “David, I have created you. I am creating you. This is part of that. You will not be done being created, being shaped, being molded, being refined, until you come back to me. Then, you will be done. Now, go work on it, but don’t rush it.” You see it, right? Already…not yet. We are created, and we are being created. We are being prepared for eternity. Not abs, not clothing racks, not the right color, not the perfect tone. ETERNITY!

With the absence of music in my life, I have been forced to engage new mediums of creativity. It is so fun. There is no ease to it. There is not a single time that I sit down at my iPad to create something that I don’t also learn something new. I have to go to the secret place all the time, because I have been doing visual art for such a short time that I forget what it looked like in the secret place. I have to go back, study it carefully, squint my eyes super hard and ask God to burn it into my head. I must go back to get that vision of myself as well. Again and again, when I begin to make up a David that God never told me about, I must go back, get a real good look, and wait for the slight pressure on the back of my head, look up for the knowing smile of assignment, and finally go back and try to render the sweet revelation of God in my life.

You are created. You are creative. You are already. You are not yet. You have become. You are becoming. This is why we opened with the passage from 1 Corinthians 13. We know in part, and we prophesy in part. God gives us tiny glimpses of, and cravings for, this eternal part of us. The part where we can see the us that God wants to make us. In some ways, we are that vision, but in many ways we are not…yet.

Here is the invitation: allow God to create you. Let him saturate you with this color, blur that line, take out some treble, add some gain. Seek God and ask him to paint upon your life whatever he sees. Don’t be upset when this takes a lifetime. Don’t be upset if this causes some turmoil in your soul. When you accept this invitation, you begin to see the eternal things, but through the temporary lenses. You see prophecy, you see knowledge, you speak in the tongues. Trust Him. Trust the divine artist. He is using these things to lead you in to the perfect, that your partial may pass away.