My Faith and my Creative Work

I have a drive to understand and know God- this impacts my work as a creative, and as a working professional.

I don’t believe in a Sunday morning “god” – someone who has given us a simple set of rules to follow and a list of professions to make and that’s how I get to heaven and avoid punishment. That way of being will make for religious life in the shallowest sense- god becomes a culture, church a social club, and religion a virtue signaling tribe for me to feel good about myself and my eternal state.

I also don’t believe in a perennial god who is “whatever you want him to be”. I believe the universe and all of nature was created by singular force, and that power has specific and consistent characteristics that manifest in patterns throughout nature and mankind.

So if there is a God who created all things, and he makes himself known to us, then what does it mean to know God, and what impact does this have?

When asked what the greatest commandment given by God was, Jesus replied:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

Matthew 22:37-40, ESV

I try to use these commandments as a lens not just view the Bible, but everything I think, feel, and do. I’ve wrestled quite a bit with what this means in my professional life, and these are some of the conclusions I’ve come to.

Love first

If I’m supposed to love God, that begs the question, what is God?

The Apostle John writes that God is love. So to love God means to love love.

So, what is love?

Thousands of poets over thousands of years have attempted to answer this question, and I make no claims to be the final word on the answer to such a deep question. But every example of love in art and in scriptures seems to point to a transcendent sacrifice: When we love something, we give up ourselves to it. Whether it’s a person, a hobby, or an idea, if we love something, that means we give up of our time, our money, our attention in service of that thing.

That’s why Jesus said “Greater Love has no man than to die for his friends.” – the pinnacle of love is a complete sacrifice of life towards something outside of oneself. So put as simply and as technically correct as I can muster:

Love is that thing which pushes us towards selfless sacrifice in service of something else.

So part of loving God means selflessly sacrificing myself in service to the of idea of selflessly sacrificing in service of something greater than myself.

Since that’s pretty circular, what else is God? What is this higher thing I’m sacrificing towards?

Articulation of Purpose

The Apostle John also quite famously writes that “The word in the beginning was God”. So am I to love all words?

The word for word here is the Greek “logos” which has a deeper meaning than just text on a page. It can also be translated as dialogue, communication, message, news, or speech. Logos means a marker for purpose. Again, as simply and as technically correct as I can:

Logos is that thing which articulates the purpose and truth of a thing.

So God being the word means that he is the original articulator of purpose, and the creator and designer of that purpose. To love God as the word means to selflessly sacrifice in service of articulating the true purpose of things.

But wait- how can God be both love and the word?

Multiplicity within a Singularity

God is not just one thing: Much like human individuals, he has many aspects contained within a singular identity. Unlike humans, he is also multiple persons contained within a singular, cohesive identity: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; the Trinity.

The simplest but still imperfect analogy I can think of for this is the center of a black hole, where an incalculable amount of mass converges into one point that continues to draw in the mass around it. This is called the singularity, and it lives outside the laws of space and time. This is similar to the way God is both infinite and singular, multiple and one.

So God the Father, the one who said “Let there be light” and spoke to Moses out of the burning bush, God the Son, the one who died on the cross to atone for the sins of the world, and God the Holy Spirit, the invisible breath of God that exists all around us, are three individual persons and also one God.

Okay, so what does that have to do with my professional creative work?

Let’s shed some light on the matter

Another direct claim the Apostle John makes about the nature of God is that he is light. This is not simply a physical claim, but a much deeper one: Light is what allows us to see, to perceive. God as light is similar to God as the word in that they both reveal truth, but with different nuance: Light is the precursor to the word (at least from our point of view, that’s why the world as we know it came into existence when God said “let there be light”) the light reveals, and the Word (Logos) articulates.

So where does that put us? If the greatest commandment is to love God, then this is part of how I understand it:

Live selflessly sacrificially in service to the very essence of selfless sacrifice, which is what reveals truth and purpose and that which articulates truth and purpose, personified in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and yet within all this multiplicity is still a singularity: One God.

This has deep connotations for how I conduct myself professionally and as a creative. All of work has to serve this goal. Which can sound like a strange heuristic to apply to something as mundane as creative marketing, but it actually turns out to be quite simple and sometimes fought against in my field:

Tell the truth.

If I’m saying a product can do something it can’t, then I’m not loving light. If I’m trying to brand a product, service, or company as something it is not, sell it’s purpose as something it doesn’t fulfill, then I’m not loving the logos – I’m not aligning myself with that which truthfully articulates purpose. This is not always what’s considered “best practices” in the marketing world (though I would argue its so much more effective in the long run).

This also can mean sacrificing my selfish vision for a project – something I would have fun making, or would look good on my portfolio, or just make me look good in general – in service of one that aligns with truth, light, and love.

As a professional, it also means I ought to love and encourage these attributes in those I work with: If I see someone sacrificing selflessly, I ought to expend resources to shed light on and articulate that as good. If I see someone committed to spreading light and articulating purpose, I ought to sacrifice in order to lift that up.

This is where the second greatest commandment comes in: When I’m committed to loving God with all my heart, all of my mind, and all of my soul, then I have to love love with all my being and all of my actions: That means the natural effect will be to live selflessly and sacrificially in relationship to those around me, especially to build up light and purpose within their lives.

And these are principles I can apply no matter who I’m doing work for or what products or services they sell: Office equipment and accessories, medical technology, artificial intelligence, HVAC Insulation – it doesn’t matter, because everything has a capacity for light, love, and an articulated purpose.

While I don’t claim to living out these principles perfectly, I can say for certain they have directly affected how I do my work and interact professionally.

A Christian who happens to be a Creative

There was this little debate in the Christian arts community (especially in relation to musicians) about calling things “Christian art” or “Christian music” and whether the people that made them were “Christian artists” or “Artists that happen to be Christian”.

As someone in creative marketing (a field with deep creativity that still ultimately uses creative mediums as communicative craft rather than for any deeper artistic purpose) this whole debate seems silly to me. The marketing videos I made for monitor stands on Amazon could hardly be called “Christian product videos”; and I suppose I am both a “Christian creative” and “a creative who happens to be Christian” in the same sense an IT technician could be a “Christian IT Professional” or a plumber could be “A plumber who happens to be a Christian”.

I do my my best to live out my love for God in everything I do through my faith in the saving grace of Jesus. This makes me a Christian.

I also happen to be a creative marketing professional, and make videos and other things in the service of selling products and services.