Don’t blame yourself for not feeling creative. The enemy works overtime to hide it from us, diminish it, and accuse us of having no talent. Don’t believe his lies anymore. You are creative. 

I think you’re incredibly creative.

Pause and notice your reaction to those words. I’m guessing it was something like, “Creative? I’m not creative.” Or, “You’ve got to be kidding. You don’t know me. My creativity isn’t valuable or worth fighting for. No one even notices it.” 

Our creativity is a fusion of our unique presence and gifting. This is a huge concept. Because it includes everyone and excludes no one except those who refuse to enter into their gifting with God. 

Have you ever considered that we are continuing to be created as we create? The God who made us shapes us as we pursue the gifts he gave us, bringing us from disorder to order.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! (2 Corinthians 5:17 NIV)

It begins with a few grains of doubt. Yet the sand quickly multiplies the more we give in to our anxieties and try to solve life’s problems in our own strength. And the enemy does everything in his power to initiate and amplify the very things that got us trapped in the first place. 

God’s motive in giving you specific talents isn’t primarily so you’ll be productive. Here’s your gift. Now get busy making things happen. It is so your desires can find their fulfillment in him. Productivity and efficiency aren’t what he’s most interested in. They measure the external performance but never the internal rhythm of your heart. God doesn’t need your help as much as he wants your heart. Whenever you start to focus more on your talents and gifts than on him, you miss the main invitation. Which is to pursue them together. With him. 

Whenever I grow impatient, or think I know best and forge ahead from my own strength, the results are never optimal. It initially may feel good. Hey, at least I’m doing something. But later, when things go wrong or my actions led to unexpected consequences, I begin to doubt if I made the right decision. 

Choosing to live with expectancy rather than expectations doesn’t mean we accept situations passively. Or pretend everything is sunshine and roses. Not at all. But we step into it with God. This requires the humility to accept the fact that we don’t know how things will ultimately work out. Thankfully, the future isn’t constrained to our list of potential outcomes. Where we see looming problems and limited options, He sees an exponential range of possibilities. 

There is an ocean of difference between expectations and expectancy. 

Expectations indicate a sense of what should be. It is how we expect things to go, often veering into entitlement. If circumstances don’t go the way we want, we feel cheated, irritated, or even offended. It’s not fair. Change—especially change we didn’t ask for—is viewed as an interruption to our plans. Many of us have carried unmet expectations for years that we need to let go of. Doing so will release these toxic emotions over something we never should have counted on to begin with. 

Even after we step into the Freedom Realm, the enemy will taunt us and try to cause us to forget our true identity. His primary strategy is to isolate us from God . . . and each other. 

The Freedom Realm is a place where you can approach your life, relationships, and creativity with peace, joy, and passion. To be surrounded by people who live, love, and create from a place of freedom obtained from relationship with God, to have a place at the table, to savor the stories of others, and to celebrate your talents as a gift from the Creator. It is a feast for the soul.

Striving and control are necessary survival tactics. When resources are scarce, someone has to win and someone has to lose. One person’s victory is hard to celebrate when it is interpreted as your loss.

When in the Orphan Realm, you believe you’re alone and that life is totally up to you. It describes how you approach life—and the state of your heart. That’s why it’s possible to be stuck in this place even when surrounded by a loving family or caring friends.

What if all that has held you back isn’t your fault? What if you’re simply living in the wrong realm? We all spend our lives in one of two places. We can’t alternate from one to the other, like trying on a new pair of clothes. The two are actually in fierce opposition to each other. 

Aiming for what’s possible in your own strength sets the bar way too low. Why be limited by your current abilities? Simply achieving what’s possible is, well, boring. Congratulations for doing what you already knew you could do. Yet we’re often more comfortable deciding next steps based on our evaluation of options from a well-reasoned pros and cons list.

In the classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the young girl finds herself before two paths. She asks the Cheshire Cat which way she should go. 

If your car has ever run of gas in the middle of nowhere, you’ll never forget the feeling of being stuck with no sign of rescue and an empty tank. 

“Pursue your dreams and bad things await.” 

Deep down, our nightmares are laced with this lie. They try to hold us back from our dreams. Life may not be what you hoped for, our fears whisper, but try to break free for something better and we will cut you to shreds. 

When we feel the world closing in around us, it’s easy to go into survival mode. We tighten our grip in an effort to not lose more. 

What would you see if you could stand outside your current circumstances? Stated another way, who would you be if the world didn’t tell you who you are?