The Life that Keeps Becoming

May 10th - The Life that Keeps Becoming, with Becca Ellis. Series: Created to Create A Spacious Christianity, First Presbyterian Church of Bend, Oregon. Scripture: Isaiah 66:7 & 13; Deuteronomy 32:18; Matthew 23:37.

Ever feel like life is just work, chores, and crashing into bed, and somewhere along the way you lost your creativity or sense of “you”? This Sunday we’re talking about how everyday life, caregiving, and even exhaustion can still be a place where creativity and new life quietly grow. You might be more creative than you think. Join us online or in person this Sunday. You’re warmly welcome to come as you are.

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At First Presbyterian, you will meet people at many different places theologically and spiritually. And we love it that way. We want to be a place where our diversity brings us together and where conversation takes us all deeper in our understanding of God.

We call this kind of faith “Spacious Christianity.” We don’t ask anyone to sign creeds or statements of belief. The life of faith is about a way of being in the world and a faith that shows itself in love.

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Keywords:

Creativity, motherhood, maintenance mode, ordinary moments, exhaustion, becoming, unfolding, nurturing, God as creator, God as mother, image of God, handiwork, poema, making meaning, parenting as formation, everyday activism, tending life, nurturing life, sacred ordinary, presbyterian, church, online worship, bend, oregon

Featuring:

Rev. Dr. Steven Koski, Rev. Sharon Edwards, Becca Ellis, Brave of Heart, Guests

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

Welcome to worship at First Presbyterian Church in Bend, Oregon. My name is Becky, and we are so grateful that you've joined us. We are a community shaped by what we call spacious Christianity, a faith wide enough for difference, honest enough for questions, and kind enough for the full truth of our lives. Here, doubts are not disqualifiers. Questions are not threats, but they're invitations into deeper faith and more authentic connection. Your story matters, and together we seek God with holy curiosity. So today, wherever you're coming from, know this, you are welcome, and your presence is a gift.

Steven: 1:26

Imagine a community where faith is about curiosity, not certainty, a journey, not a finish line, a practice, not a rigid set of rules. Wonder not fear, grace not perfection, compassion, not exclusion, a seat at the table for all where everyone belongs. That's exactly what you'll find at First Presbyterian join us.

Becca Ellis: 5:28

I once read a reflection from a mother trying to find her way back to Creative work after having children in the middle of exhaustion and the everyday demands of parenthood, and she wrote the act of creation often signals the end of creativity. And I've been reflecting on that recently, because over the years, I've heard many mothers talk about this feeling of losing their creative expression for a variety of reasons once they have kids. And it makes sense, because I think there are these seasons in life where we are actively creating, especially when we're young and just starting out in our adult lives, right? Like we're doing all the things and checking the boxes, going to school, stepping into careers, maybe getting married and starting families. We are creating a life for ourselves, building something, stepping into who we're becoming, and then somewhere along the way, it gets a little less exciting. Life fills up with responsibility, with routines, with the quiet weight of just showing up every day, and it can start to feel less like creating and more like maintaining, like we're just going through the motions like we spent all this time building a life, and now we're just trying to keep up with it. I have a feeling I'm not the only one who has felt this, and especially as a mom to three kids, I can relate to what that mother was talking about, this feeling that you've run out of space for anything creative in your life, and those early years of raising young children were a blur, a beautiful blur, no doubt, motherhood changed my life in ways I never knew were possible, cracked me open and expanded my understanding of love and heartache and what surrender really looks like, but it's also exhausting, repetitive and all consuming. It's easy to lose yourself or parts of yourself in it. And I don't think this only happens within the context of motherhood. It's just that life itself can wear you down. I think a lot of us know what it feels like to live in maintenance mode. We go to work, pay the bills, take care of what's in front of us until we fall into bed and do it all over again the next day. And if we're being real, most of life is lived in these in between ordinary moments, right? And that's normal and okay, but somewhere in there, creativity can start to feel like a luxury, or even like something we've lost, or maybe we wonder if we ever had it in the first place. And sometimes it goes even deeper than that. Sometimes it's not just that life feels full, it's that it doesn't look the way we thought it would, the life we imagined doesn't quite match the life we're living, and there can be a quiet grief in that, and on a day like today, Mother's Day, that can feel especially close for some of us, for those who have lost mothers, or long to be mothers, or carry complicated relationships with our mothers or children, and that belongs here too. It's part of the story we carry, and should be honored. But the story we're living might be bigger than the one we've been telling ourselves. You know, when you look at the creation narrative in Genesis, God doesn't just create the world. Then step back and say, okay, humans, the fun part is over. Now you manage it. God stays. God speaks. God says, This is so very good. God continues, bringing life forward. God says, tend to the land and go make more life. I'm always in complete awe of how the natural world works, how there's this code to continue making life embedded into our very existence? I imagine God delighting in the possibilities of what creation will create, not just in what was made, but what would keep becoming. What a beautiful thing that creation doesn't end. It continues to unfold that there is still room for the unexpected. You know, I remember when I first started my photography business. This was around 10 years ago, and I had two very young kids, but was finally coming out of that fog of those early baby years, going from one to two kids was much more challenging than I. Expected, but I was starting to feel more like myself again, and had just launched my business. It felt like something new was opening up for me creatively. And then a week later, I found out I was pregnant with my third child, and honestly, this was hard for me to admit at the time, and a whole other layer of mom guilt, but I was really depressed about it, not because I didn't love being a mom, but because it felt like something I had just started was already slipping away, and it took me a while to see that maybe this wasn't the end of something, but the reshaping of it. I actually love that we're talking about creativity on Mother's Day. In this series, we've been talking about what it means to be created, to create, and I don't know if there's a more embodied example of that than motherhood, like you literally grow a human being, create a life, carry it, bring it into the world. And I think it's interesting that we often talk about God as the Great Creator, but we don't talk as often about the mothering nature of God. God the one who labored and birthed the world into existence, the one who nurtures and sustains but it's there all throughout Scripture. God isn't limited to just one metaphor. God is father, yes, but also a mother who labors, nurtures, feeds and fiercely gathers her loved ones. We read some of this imagery in passages like Isaiah 66 which says, As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you. And in Deuteronomy, God is described as the one who birthed God's people. And again, in Isaiah, we read how God cries out like a woman in labor. Even Jesus uses maternal language in Matthew saying how he longs to gather people like a mother hen gathers her chicks beneath her wings. So if we are made in the image of this, creating, birthing, nurturing God, then creativity isn't optional to who we are. This ability to bring new life into being, it's our birthright. It's an integral part of our design. But maybe we've defined creativity too narrowly, because creativity isn't just making art or beautiful things to look at. It's how we shape our days, how we respond to what's needed, how we improvise in love. It's turning a hard moment into connection. It's the ability to make meaning in ordinary moments. In fact, one of my favorite things about being a mom is how you can take a regular Tuesday afternoon and turn it into something special, and as parents especially, we're given this profound opportunity to create our children's days while they're living at home in our care. It can be brutally exhausting work. You constantly wonder if you're doing anything right, and hope your children might need less therapy than you have from your own childhood, but it is some of the most important work we will ever do. You know, I think it was Mother Teresa who said, If you want to change the world, go home and love your family. And that can feel almost too simple, right? Because it's easy to look around and see the big, visible, impactful things people are doing, and feel a little unimportant as you're picking up Cheerios off the floor, changing diapers, diffusing tantrums, and just trying to keep your kids alive. But I actually think we don't talk enough about the work of parenting as a kind of quiet daily formation, maybe even a kind of activism in its own right, shaping people who will go out into the world and shape others. And if you want to talk about creativity, anyone who has had a three year old meltdown in the grocery store knows the level of creativity it takes to navigate that moment. It's not flashy, it's not glamorous. You don't get applause or hardly even noticed for most of it, you don't always produce something tangible and easy to show. It's not something you can hang in a gallery and put on display. But I would argue that some of the most profound creative work that is done never hangs on a wall. It lives in people. Which makes me think of this line in the book of Ephesians, where it says that we are God's handiwork. The Greek word translated as handiwork. Here is poema. It's where we get the word poem. It implies the level of artistry, something made, something crafted. So you could say we are God's poem. And I love that, because poems don't rush to get to the point they unfold line by line, there's space in them to breathe mystery. They don't always follow a predictable structure, and they're not forced into perfection. They take shape over time, and sometimes they surprise you, and I wonder if our lives are a little like that. To formed, intentional, not always predictable, still unfolding. And maybe creativity isn't just about what we produce. Maybe it's about what we are tending how we show up each day, and invite imagination into our lives as they unfold before us, or as music producer and author Rick Rubin summarizes it, creativity is not a thing you do. It's a way of being. Because for a lot of us, creativity doesn't disappear, it just changes shape. It becomes quieter, more woven into the fabric of our days. I want to share with you a short video clip from a conversation I had with an artist and mother, Jen McCaffery, because she puts words to that shift so beautifully as it relates to before and after she had children,

Unknown: 15:57

my creativity shifted significantly when I started playing with art and creativity with my kids. And I think prior to that, I was really interested in painting technically, like I wanted to make a tree look like a really good tree, and get all the values right and the shapes right, and the all the things that make up a tree. And now I'm much more interested in what really sings to people, because I see how my kids create and how my kids respond, and it's so it's so pure, so intuitive. They can appreciate like technical art also, and look at something and say, Wow, that's a really great tree. But they're much more alive when they see that I've painted a unicorn. They're like the epicenter of what's beautiful and joyful in my life. And so if I can be inspired in my mothering, and then take that inspiration, I feel like half the work is already done during the day, as I'm living my life with them, as I've dedicated more time to creating, I've gone away from being concerned with being a good technician to making things that really make me feel alive and that I love looking at. And that could be a combination of colors I'm obsessed with and making that into an abstract or it could be playing with animal shapes or different things that I actually like and want to see. There's a lot of joy that you can get out of doing something really well, but I find more joy in making something that I want to look at every day, and it's rarely technically perfect. So I think that if I could go back and talk to myself, you know, 10 years ago, I would say, don't worry so much about whether or not your rendering skills are perfect. They don't need to be to make something that you love.

Becca Ellis: 17:49

There's so much I love in that clip, the shift from trying to make something perfect to making something that actually makes you feel alive, the realization that maybe creativity was never gone. It just changed shape. And how her children actually taught her how to be more free while engaging in her creative practice, and that one line that half the work is already done in the living of it, I think that's true for more of us than we realize, because so much of what we're doing every day, caring for people, showing up, responding, holding things together, that is the creative work. And it will never happen perfectly, but it can be intentional. And so maybe that line we started with, that the act of creation signals the end of creativity isn't the whole story. Maybe it's actually an invitation, an invitation into a different kind of creativity, one that is less visible, less polished, but no less sacred, because the God who creates also nurtures, sustains and stays and wherever life is being tended in a home, in a friendship, in a workplace, in your own inner life, creation is still unfolding. You are still participating in it, and there is room even here for the unimaginable to take place, a sacred unfolding just think, what if more people in our world were living from a place like that, in tune with this nurturing, creative spirit that we all hold within a spirit we have inherited as our birthright from the God who made us in God's likeness, I feel like we would be living in a very different world. So as you move into this week, I wonder, if the question isn't, what do I have time to create? But instead, where is life already being placed in my hands, and how am I being invited to tend to it? What can I nurture within myself? So I can better show up with love, because you don't have to wait for more time or more space or a different season. The work is already there, and it matters and it is enough. Peace. Be With You, God. We come into this moment aware that so much of life is lived in the middle, not at the beginning, where things feel open and full of possibility, not at the end, where we hope everything is resolved and clear, but here in the middle, where life is full and ordinary and sometimes heavy, where we are showing up again and again, doing what needs to be done holding what needs to be held. And we confess that in these seasons, something in us can start to feel distant. Creativity can feel far away. Joy can feel harder to access. We can even feel like it's harder to recognize ourselves. And yet, you do not step away from us in these places you stay. You continue to speak life into what feels tired. You continue to form what feels unfinished. You continue to create, not just at the beginning of things, but in the middle of them. God, we thank you that we are your handiwork, your poem still unfolding, not mass produced, not completed too quickly, but shaped slowly, line by line with space, for mystery, for surprise, for becoming and we thank you. That creativity is not something we have to chase or earn or get back, but something already woven into the way we live, love, respond and tend in the meals we make, the conversations we hold, the patience we offer, the days we shape, the love we return to again and again, even there, especially there you are, present. So for anyone who feels weary today, for anyone who feels like they've lost something of themselves along the way. For anyone carrying grief for what hasn't turned out as hoped, would you gently remind them nothing has been wasted, nothing is finished. Nothing is too far gone. For you to work with Teach us to see our lives not as maintenance but as participation in something still unfolding, not as endings, but as continuing creation, and give us eyes to notice it, the unexpected beauty, the quiet joy, the life that keeps showing up in ways we didn't plan for, but somehow still need. We trust you with what is unfinished in us. We trust you with what is ordinary in us. We trust you with what is still becoming Amen There is a line that goes, you are allowed to be both a masterpiece and a work in progress simultaneously. Friends. May that be true for you this week? May you trust the quiet ways God is still creating in and through you, in the tending, in the showing up, even when no one sees it. May you go from here with a gentleness towards your own life, noticing what is already being formed in you, even if it doesn't look like what you expected. And may you remember you are not behind and you are not finished. As poet Danielle Dobie writes, you are a season of becoming Go in peace and go in the deep assurance that you are held by the one who is still making all things new, even now,

Musicians: 26:47

friends, this worship broadcast is only possible because of your generous support. We need your support in sharing this spacious Christianity, a faith that welcomes questions, embraces difference and makes room for everyone. Please consider making a financial gift today. You can give online at bend fp.org, or by using the QR code on your screen. Thank you for worshiping with us. It's a gift to have you here until next time. May God bless you.