Creative Spin

Your life is only as dull as you make it. The raw mate­ri­als of life are pretty much the same for most of us. We grow up aver­age. Our tragedies are about the same — just with dif­fer­ent areas of con­cern. For some, those defi­cien­cies are about fam­ily, for oth­ers they are about health or money. I believe that it is all a test of our imag­i­na­tion. Do we fight our lim­i­ta­tions or rise above them? Can we find the cre­ative spin that takes our lives from tragedies to come­dies — or at least to adventures?

Every­day life can be pretty tedious. If you are not care­ful, you will wake up each morn­ing to a list of your own lim­i­ta­tions and for­get that they are there for a rea­son. They are the ten­nis net in the game of life. They are the hoop ten feet high just a size big­ger than your life bas­ket­ball. You are not faster, so you have to be smarter — or at least a bit more cre­ative than the other players.

I used to have a weekly TV call-in show on pub­lic tele­vi­sion. One week I had guests from the local Star Trek chap­ter. I was expect­ing some freaky losers that could not relate well to any­one else. What I got was an every­day soc­cer mom. She was bright, witty, and had a firm grasp of the demands on her time. Her mode of oper­a­tion was Star Ship Cap­tain. All of her kids played along. It made them unique in the neigh­bor­hood. They did not pull their mini­van into the garage, like other peo­ple did. No, they had a rit­ual. They were dock­ing with the mother ship. Each approach to the house was delib­er­ate and included the focus of every lit­tle imag­i­na­tion in the van. Their cre­ative spin on this rou­tine event brought them closer together.

The fam­ily that plays together stays together. They share a com­mon lev­ity of mood and rich­ness of imag­i­na­tion. They may risk a lit­tle ridicule, but they have a sto­ry­line that keeps them teth­ered together. With­out a sim­ple com­mon theme, iso­la­tion and bore­dom fill the vac­uum. Life takes pos­i­tive imag­i­na­tion — cre­ative spin. I some­times see my call to min­istry as a secret assign­ment to a strange planet to com­bat an invis­i­ble foe and to do so with an unseen weapon (spirituality).

For as weird as this may seem to you, it gen­er­ates an amaz­ing amount of pos­i­tive energy. Some peo­ple get up and trudge off to work, oth­ers of us awake to an excit­ing mis­sion. It is all in the spin.