Learning to be Creative

Boy have I been busy! If you don’t already know, I have been making oyster shells into ring dishes and decorations!! It has been both joyful and exhausting. In addition to the actual painting of the shells, I need a small army to help with the bleaching, scrubbing, cleaning and then packaging of all of my oysters. I am truly blessed with many many helping hands- from neighbors who deliver oysters to my house by the bucket loads to friends and family who scub and paint a base coat with smiles on their faces! My mom and I work on the inside of the shells to make sure that each one is perfect before sending it off. And I can’t forget my husband, Scotty, who has his hands in a lot of the prep work but is also the sole volunteer in the packaging team! I am so blessed!

I never considered myself to be very creative. I might have had good ideas but was always too much of a perfectionist to be happy with any of my work. Even now, I have a really really hard time being satisfied with my work. I want people to be happy with how they spent their money. As I work on these shells, it brings me back to my Point Pleasant days and listening to Mr. Frankie (if you know, you know) talk week after week and year after year about creation. I think about all of the extremely magnificent works of art that God has made around us. I’m partial to the sea, of course, and everything that comes with it...the tide, the beach, the shells and sea creatures. But what about the mountains and the deserts and outer space! How truly creative is our God??!!

But our God’s most prized creation is you and me. How can God be more proud of creating little, broken, sinful me over the ocean?? How am I more magnificent than the stars and the sun?? The reason that we are his most prized creation is because we are made in His image. Genesis 1:27 says, “ So God created man in His own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” But what does that even mean?

It means that there are things that are true about God that are also true about us. For example, since God is loving, he has created us to love too. Since God is just, patient, and joyful, He calls us to be those things too. The very first thing that the Bible teaches us about God is that He is creative. He created every single oyster shell unique and beautiful. When I am adding a little bit of color to the inside, I like to leave the outside in its natural state. Humans can’t create that same amount of beauty!

If you happen to snag one of my oysters, every time you look at it I want you to think about how you are made in the image of God and how He made no mistakes or flaws when creating you!

**ps - you can find these under "shop" on this website

-C.