creativity lost

I'm not a huge fan of North Park's chapel program, but I can now say that I've been to campus chapel at other schools, and ours is much better. Anyway, I went to chapel today and was surprised by two things: 1) the speaker was not talking about social justice or what we should be doing to reach out to the world (and completely ignoring those who are called to minister to suburbanites, college students, or by marrying and participating in creation by having a family...), 2) and more importantly, I actually learned something. Yes. I did.

It was actually during chapel chat, which is one of the more beautiful "programs" that UMin has put together. Today's speaker was answering someone's question as I came in and I heard him say, "We consume so much media [his talk was on media consumption, 'case you couldn't tell] that we lose our will to create. We just don't have it in us because we've taken so much in and put nothing out." It's funny that he said that, because I've been thinking recently how creativity-deprived I am. Honestly, it's a funny thing for a vocal performance major to say, but it's true. I have not been able to spend time exercising my creative abilities outside of singing, and singing is not even a creative process for me anymore because it has been beaten down by the industry.

When speaker-guy said that today, it clicked. All of the vague ideas floating around in my head finally made some sense! I'm working on narrowing down the topic of my independent study to a semester-sized bit, and with an umbrella topic of "Christian Sexuality" there's a long way to go. I've been reading a lot and writing a little, but what I mostly write is just a bunch of summaries and some musings, but not a whole lot of my own thought at this point. In light of this discovery, and in light of the fact that I am not actually starting this project until next fall (or summer?), I have decided to just do some freewriting. I think this will help me figure out where my interests lie and what my own opinions and presuppositions are, while giving me a break from all of this thinking. And then I can focus on my actual schoolwork.

But this does not only apply to my personal academics--oh, no! I think that it would be very good for my group of friends to spend some time being creative. A few of us do some sort of yarn crafting on a regular basis, and I think one of my close guy friends writes poetry on occasion, though I'm sure he isn't right now. The difficulty would be to convince them that this would be good for us--we all have a really hard time putting aside our work for a while to do something seemingly useless. But it's not useless...

Anyway, I'm rambling now because it's late and it's been a very long and exhausting day. I'll probably look at this later and laugh. Until then, BED.

Peace