Creative Coworkers with the Almighty

It’s not hard to find creative energy at work in our world. If you want a real challenge, try to find a part of creation that is static and dead. Try to find something that is not in flux and actively working with God to create reality. Everywhere you look you will find creation in all of its forms, both living and nonliving, working to create the world in cooperation with God.

Every tree grows with compounding, fractal surprises. Branches split and bend toward the light. After a few divisions and turnings, the various possibilities of form are so numerous our minds cannot count them all.

Your DNA, spun from God’s building blocks and your parents’ choices, has knit the flesh of your body into something that has never existed in the cosmos. Your life choices and experience work further with these raw materials until one day, there you sit in all your frail glory.

Rivers fed by snowflakes—themselves unique works of art as we are told—rush down mountains, carving a unique path to the sea. Every river seeks the ocean, but each will arrive having cut its own way through the land. And along the banks of these rivers, every bobbing flower is both a spectator and a one-of-a-kind masterpiece.

There are no copies in creation, no cheap imitations. And this is not because God micromanages the world, but because God apparently loves freedom. God loves watching things grow. Is it any wonder that God enjoys cooperating with you and me to do his moral and spiritual work? Our choices, good and bad, constantly spin the Kingdom of Heaven in new and unforeseen directions. We are creative coworkers with the Almighty.

A young man decides to go to dental school instead of joining a family business. His Christianity leads him to be a loving presence of Christ with his patients, many of whom have been afraid of dentists in the past. And sometimes he ministers to poor people in a free clinic on the border of Mexico. Clearly his dentistry has become a ministry. Does this mean that God could not have used him as a businessman? Of course not. We need loving and spiritual people in every line of work—lawyers, truck drivers, schoolteachers—even preachers.

This is the work of God. This is God’s preferred method. We have freedom to do good work and create new things with the anchored and unchanging building blocks of reality–dividing, branching, changing, choosing one path and not another. The method is remarkable in its trust of you and me; frightening when we consider the terrible ramifications of our freedom; stunning if we imagine all the worlds that might have been and how playfully God allows them not to be.

What is our place in the ongoing work of creation and redemption? The author of Psalm 8 wonders this as well:

When I look at the heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?

(Ps. 8:3-4, NRSV)

The psalmist wonders what human beings are that God would be mindful of us. I don’t know what we are. I don’t know what we bring to the table of creation. It seems that we gum up the works as often as we contribute something meaningful. But God is thankfully, beautifully, gracefully mindful of us. We are in God’s mind. We are born of his creativity and that creativity, lives in all the cells of our bodies. Our lives matter. We make a difference in the world.

How we live is important, so in humility, live well. What we choose helps to change the world, so listen prayerfully and choose well. God makes use of our lives and our creative choices. God is mindful of us. Remember this, and it shall be well with your soul. It shall be well within you.