By: Joshua Smith
Every creative has to navigate a tension between two inner selves. Their artistic self seeks to express ideas and vision while their evaluative self measures, compares, and criticizes those efforts. These sides constantly wrestle like wolves. Which one wins? The one that’s most fed.
So many creatives and would-be artists suffer because their inner voices have withered or never reached full expression. Their impossible-to-silence evaluative selves look around and see others standing where they wish to be. The social media icons and influencer luminaries who fill their daily feeds project only perfection; it’s easy for the critical creative to think that their ideas are already accomplished and their visions are better achieved. Why start (or keep) running when others have already crossed the finish line?
Solomon addresses this in Ecclesiastes 3. His words about the seasons recall the timely divisions that give order and boundaries to our efforts and expectations. Each thing—every idea, endeavor, relationship, and career—has rules that govern its birth, growth and maturation: don’t await spring harvest in fall; don’t plant seeds in winter; and don’t compare your fledgling fruit to the mature fields of others. We ignore these rules to our own peril.
This seasonal illustration hides a more challenging admonition: don’t plant and harvest continually. There is an equally important time to leave fields to winter’s rest and not plant. This pause is essential to future outcomes, but it’s not all about saving or wasting energy. For Christians, there is a governing connection between rest and faith. Sabbath times (Sunday and otherwise) evidence and expand faith by conferring success back onto God’s shoulders. Watchman Nee wrote in Sit, Walk, Stand, “Christianity does not begin with walking; it begins with sitting…and we are invited at the very outset to sit down and enjoy what God has done for us; not to set out to try and attain it for ourselves.” God’s invitation to rest comes regularly, seasonally, but in comparison to others and the pursuit of goals provoke the picking back up of work tools.
Work has to be accomplished—relational work, general living work, corporate business work and even creative artist work. Anything that goads us to measure success solely by what human effort can achieve negates an essential, theological truth that David wrote in Psalms 31: “My times are in Your hand.” Planting times, growing times, harvesting times, resting times—every stage and season of life, work and creative expression rests securely in God’s capable ability to manage them. Either he is omnipotent or He is not.
Perhaps nothing evidences trust and true faith more than resting from work. God’s admonition to rest is so important that He built it into a weekly regimen (not just an annual one like so many other celebratory remembrances). Taking a purposeful pause from the busyness of life may be the most important thing a creative person does. These times help recalibrate ears and hearts to be more in tune with God by creating distance from all the other clamoring voices. A good rest can refashion relationships, careers and creativity.
Lives are changed when they connect with God and this happens all year long at Hume. It’s the main reason I’m so excited for Hume’s Creative Arts Conference this October 26-29—and why I’m leading a workshop at the conference. The chance to hear Him uniquely, grow good rest muscles and feed the artistic self through creative workshops and inspiring lectures makes this conference unlike anything else in Hume’s lineup. If you know a creative, or are one yourself, I entreat you to come away with a small group of others just like you, in order that you might return home changed and new. Click the button below for info.
Joshua Smith is an Alum of Hume. Joshua and his wife Stephanie own Pillar Brands, a faith-based content and marketing agency where he is the Creative Director. In 2023, Joshua launched JoshuaSmithPhoto.com to showcase and sell prints of his fine art landscape photographs from around the world. Follow him on Facebook or Instagram using @joshuasmithphotos.
