The Lie That Will Keep You From Creating

Today’s COMPEL blog post comes from writer Meredith Boggs.

There was a lie that I long believed that crippled my creativity. It was the lie that I had to have something of value to offer the world or else I should remain silent.

It was the lie that my creating and composing the written word in a way that resonates with the souls of others, bringing beauty into the world through words, was not enough if it didn’t come along with a check with a certain amount of zeros at the end or generate thousands of Instagram followers. 

Allowing that belief to pervade, the belief that I needed to offer something of value to in turn be valuable, halted my creativity. The belief left me creatively stagnant for months. Rather than writing the words God had placed on my heart, I spent my days curating social media captions and formatting high-value PDFs, and doing all the things I had been told brought value. It led me to retreat within, offering less and less of my gift to the world because it didn’t measure up compared to what others were bringing to the world.

The heart of the struggle of living the creative life we were called to live is that we will never get to work, doing the very thing we were created to do, if we are too busy measuring our thing up against someone else’s thing. We will never be able to create from the essence of who we are if we’re trying to make sure there is a value proposition to our creative work.  

This lie I believed, the lie that I must create something of value to offer the world, because writing and the beauty of crafting words wasn’t enough, ironically could only be dismantled as I began to do that work of writing. That lie could only be rendered powerless if I sat down in the chair, fingers to keys, creating and crafting, stringing words into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs.

If you’ve fallen prey to this lie and felt its crippled effects on your creativity, the gift that God has uniquely and divinely given to you remember this next time you sit down to write; There’s no one else that can do the very thing that you do. There is no one else who will do that work of creating for you if you do not do it. 

What a terrible loss it is to the world when we refrain from doing the very thing we were created to do because of the lie that what we offer is not valuable. Don’t deprive the world of your passion, work and creativity. Go out and create, fulfill the unique and specific calling on your life by creating and offering your words to the world.