Created to Create

My heart is astir with a good theme;
I address my verses to the King;
My tongue is the pen of a ready writer.
Psalm 45:1 (NASB)

I don’t know if Psalm 45:1 is my favorite verse, but it’s a contender. It depicts my understanding of what it means to be a Christian writer and artist. God fills my heart with a good theme. He makes it stir, overflow, to the point that I have to say something, anything.

I can’t be silent when my hearts brims to the full; it spills over and splashes onto the words I write and the images I draw. It fills the projects I create. I find myself wanting to share the hope I find in Christ, a hope that makes me resilient, strong, steady.

None of that would be possible if I didn’t live in a state of readiness. The psalm above says the writer has the “pen of a ready writer.” This is a writer who yearns for verses to address to the King and lives in expectancy of receiving them. It’s no empty hope he holds; Romans 5 says that this sort of hope doesn’t disappoint. It satisfies every longing because it is “the love of God…poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us” (Romans 5:5 NASB).

The Message puts the hope in a much more jubilant and expectant tone:

[Hope keeps] us alert for whatever God will do next. In alert expectancy such as this, we’re never left feeling shortchanged. Quite the contrary – we can’t round up enough containers to hold everything God generously pours into our lives through the Holy Spirit!

That’s the sort of writer who’s described in Psalm 45. It’s the writer poised on the edge of her seat, the writer filled with “alert expectancy,” the writer who “can’t round up enough containers to hold everything God generously pours” into her life through the Holy Spirit, the writer who believes in the God who can do far more super-abundantly in both quantity and quality than all she asks and thinks, and she dares to ask Him to do that because she knows He can and because she desires it, she desires to be used. She’s His ready writer, her heart is filled to overflowing, and she wants to address her verses to the King.