Defining Creative

CONFESSION #20: I often throw around the adjective "creativity" or "creative" like they're candy.

The topic of my senior english class is literacy and whether college is preparing students to be literate members of society. This class has presented some interesting conversations, and today we focused on creativity, which was right up my alley.

Something that we talked about is that there is a difference between creativity and discovery, which makes a lot of sense.

The adjective "creative" is defined by Merriam-Webster as:

having or showing an ability to make new things or think of new ideas

Creative people create. They make new things.

People that discover merely find things. 

Art is a creative field. Science is a field of discovery. 

For some reason this idea is pretty mind blowing to me. 

How cool is it that God gave humans the gift of being creative, of making new things? Of course, whatever we make isn't completely new and original since we use pre-existing materials, but to be creative is to be able to make new things. 

Simultaneously, this changes the way that we use the word "creative." We can't use the word creative to describe finding a cure for a disease or even finding a nifty way to solve a math problem. We can use the word "innovative", but creative isn't an effective word for those actions.

Creativity is certainly a God given gift, and it's a gift that humans are given because we're made in the image of the creator. 

Side thought, God never discovers anything. He created everything, so what is there for Him to discover? Just a floating thought.

This post is part of a 31 day series called Confessions of a Creative Christian.