Created to Create

In 2020, a group of people I knew online started mailing each other handmade cards. No reason except that everything felt impossibly far away and someone thought maybe a physical thing, something made by actual hands and sent through an actual mailbox, might reach people in a way that screens couldn't.

I found that group at exactly the right time. Connected with someone who needed exactly what I happened to be able to give. Made something by hand for a person I'd never met who was carrying a grief I couldn't fix but could, in some small way, sit with.

That's not a coincidence to me.

I'm a person of faith. And the older I get, the more I see creativity not as something I do but as something I was given. A way of connecting, reaching people, making something real out of what's invisible. The card I sent that year didn't heal anyone. But it traveled. And something in the making of it felt like more than craft.

Made in the image of a creator

There's a concept in my faith called imago dei. Made in the image of God.

Most people hear that and think about morality or dignity or what makes humans different from other animals. All of that is there. But what strikes me most is something simpler.

If we're made in the image of God, and the first thing we see God do in scripture is create, then creativity isn't incidental to who we are. It's built into the blueprint.

The Bible calls God the potter. Jesus was a carpenter. These aren't metaphors chosen at random. They're images of someone who makes things with their hands, who shapes raw material into something with purpose and meaning. That's not a distant, abstract deity. That's someone who understands what it feels like to look at something you've made and know it's good.

I find that genuinely comforting. On the days when making something feels small or self-indulgent or like I should be doing something more important, I come back to this. The act of creating isn't separate from my faith. For me it's an expression of it. A way of participating in something that started long before I did.

Creativity as connection

Making something for another person is different from making something for yourself.

Not better or worse. Just different. When you're making for someone else the whole process shifts. You're thinking about them. What they need. What might reach them. What you want them to feel when they open it.

That kind of making is one of the most human things I know how to do. And I think it's one of the reasons creativity has always felt like more than a hobby to me. More than regulation or output or skill.

During the pandemic, I made a lot of things for people I'd never met. Cards mostly. Little handmade objects that traveled through the mail to people who were isolated and grieving and exhausted. I couldn't fix any of what they were going through. But I could make something with intention and care and send it out into the world toward someone who needed it.

There's a word for that kind of reaching toward someone you can't physically touch. I'd call it love. Sometimes I'd call it prayer. Often both at once.

That's not something I can prove. But it's real to me. And it shapes why I make things, not just how.

A note for everyone

This is my faith. I'm not asking you to share it.

But if you're someone who has wondered whether your faith and your creativity belong together, whether it's okay to see the making as something sacred, I'd say yes. Absolutely yes. They were never separate to begin with.

The DIYvinci Community is a space for people who make things. Whatever brings you to the making, whether that's nervous system regulation, creative expression, faith, grief, joy, or just because your hands need somewhere to go, you're welcome there.

It's free. Come as you are. community.diyvinci.com