22 Feb Public Journal :: 009 • Love, Hurry, & Creativity

Each week, I review all ten of my BE Words (my core values) and choose one to focus on practicing. Usually I cycle through my list of words in order. The past two weeks were different. I’m finding myself camping out on the word Discipline.

Week one I improved my discipline in the practice of tracking all of my purchases as I make them.

Week last I focused on the discipline of creating energetic and creative momentum with my morning routine and winding my energy down well at the end of my days.

This week I’m compelled to revisit discipline once more. I’m applying discipline to the idea of hurry.

My Wednesday night small group is moving slowly through a series on worry by John Mark Comer based on his best-selling book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. Our pace is fitting. Comer’s work emphasizes the idea that, although culture praises it, hurry is the antithesis of the kind of life Jesus models for his followers. Go figure.

Furthermore, Comer drives home the point that hurry is incompatible with love. The Apostle Paul underscores this point in 1 Corinthians 13, using “patient” as his first in a list of words to describe love. If Jesus’s central ethic was the idea that we should love one another, then hurry is conceptually opposed to that ethic.

I’m challenged by what this idea means for my work as a creative.

When I consider the relationship I want to have with my creative work, I want it to be characterized by love. This means that I cannot be in a hurry when I’m engaging with it. 

Last week I found myself in a hurry creatively—and I hated it. It was so difficult to access my love for creating, not just love the feeling but also love expressed as sacrifice. 

As Comer puts it, hurry doesn’t come from having a lot to do, it comes from having too much to do. An important part of what helps me protect the love in my relationship with creating is the discipline of staying organized. Organization helps to create the pace that prevents overwhelm. 

It’s not that I always create slowly. It’s that I do what is necessary to allow the work the time it needs to develop. As my proficiency grows, so does my efficiency in the process. But this efficiency is not the point. The professional creative world around us will certainly lobby to convince us otherwise but we must examine that world critically. 

How much love do we really see modeled in the hurry-based approach to creating? Isn’t more common that selfish ambition is at the root of “move-as-fast-as-possible” thinking?  

And at the root of selfish ambition, fear? 

Fear is the underlying source of all hurry. Love and hurry cannot coexist because love and fear cannot co-exist. Perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4:18).

The point for me is that I continue to love what I do. Proficiency leading to efficiency enables me to serve well—it reduces the influence of fear. I still must make a choice to serve and to do so from a love-based motivation.

So this week, I’m engaging discipline once again: discipline in the service of creating space for pace & eliminating hurry from my creative process.

God, I invite You into dynamic recognizing You as my caring Father. You understand how all of this works because You have all of the understanding that there is to have on every subject. For this reason I trust You. Ultimately, it’s my goal to surrender everything, including my creative process, to You. You are love—what better way to create in love than to consult You? Help me to be more mindful of Your creative leading this week. Give me the wisdom to know how to move, the courage to engage, and a heart of service.