Link: Image Bearing in the Creative Process

Good read on creativity as image bearing, related to the Incarnation.

Whoa. This blows my mind. The incarnation was not a sentimental Mary-Joseph-Jesus community making polite conversation about image bearing in the coffee scented basement of a church. Incarnation is messy. It’s disruptive. It’s the biggest thing in the universe confining itself inside the most fragile container in the universe—a dying body.

As I began to grasp this friction-filled, disruptive idea of incarnation, the sometimes banal, mostly painful, creative process took on meaning.

Reflecting on the incarnation of Christ provides renewed insight into the creative process. It is disruptive. It is grace and suffering. It is birthing an idea through a space that is too small to contain it. It is life entering a dying body. It is the unseen becoming seen.

Paul reminds us of this friction of incarnation in his letter to the Corinthians: “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of the Lord Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.”

As artists, we live in the friction of absolute perplexity without despair so that our dying bodies can contain the un-dying life of Christ. This friction is the essence of the creative process.

Image Bearing in the Creative Process | Todays Christian Woman.