Worship - With Creativity

Good morning everyone. I am Pastor Jen. If I have not had a chance to meet you before.

I always put these here in that I never drink them. I always forget about them. We'll see.

I've been with the house since day one and I guess we're telling our virgin stories today, aren't we?

And it has been a joy as we just celebrated our 10th year to reflect on that with each other

and to think about what God has done in the last 10 years and then looking ahead to the next 10, Lord willing.

We've been doing a series on worship and we're going to start off with an activity because I'm a school teacher as well.

I don't teach in a school anymore. I am a teacher but I have been a school teacher so I have a bit of a lesson planned everyone

which is triggering for some of you. But you all have a piece of paper on the table.

If you don't have enough at your table for everyone there is certainly enough around.

So this is a required activity. Some of you are already like, I'll tell you how required it is.

But I'm going to have you do this. You've got a jar or a glass container on your table with random things in it.

And if anybody has ever taken an art class this is called a still life and you're going to draw it.

Bree's over here playing with it. And all of a sudden some of you had some very visceral reactions to me saying that.

So we're going to put on some music for just a couple of minutes and you are going to spend some time drawing.

Fun! Or reflecting on the, and listen, I want you to consider there are all sorts of kind of drawings in the world around us.

Whether it's Picasso in his cubist period or Michelangelo. So be kind to yourself. There you go.

Go. Oh, I am drinking out of this by the way.

I'm drinking out of this by the way.

I'm breathing out of this by the way.

Oh, I'm drinking out of this by the way.

I'm drinking out of this by the way.

I'm going to give you guys about 30 more seconds. It doesn't have to be a finished drawing.

All I said was draw.

All right. I'm going to keep going. But you can keep drawing if you want to. If you're like, I am going to finish this.

And for some people, drawing while somebody is talking or doing something while somebody is talking is actually a very helpful way for you to listen.

So feel free to do that. But this experience was very different for each of you.

For some of you it was highly terrorizing. And for some of you you're like, great, okay, no problem. Get me to the pencils.

And my guess is you found yourself managing the voices in your head. And some of you were hearing, you're not creative.

You don't draw. You don't know how to do this. This is going to be embarrassing. Oh, this is going to be a disaster.

I don't even know how to draw a straight line. But I didn't ask you to do any of that stuff.

I didn't ask you to draw well. I didn't ask you to draw with straight lines.

I didn't ask you to put on the display or draw better than the person next to you. I simply asked you to draw what you see.

But the inner voice tends to qualify how we do that.

When scripture talks about the ways that we respond to God through praise and worship, it's largely not qualified.

When we read passages in which the how is described to the whole of the nation of Israel, overwhelmingly we don't see qualifiers.

First Chronicles 16-23 says, Sing to the Lord all the earth proclaim his salvation day after day.

Jeremiah 20-13, Sing to the Lord, give praise to the Lord. He rescues the life of the needy from the hands of the wicked.

Romans 12-1, Therefore I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.

This is your true and proper worship. Psalm 100, 1 and 2, Shout for joy to the Lord all the earth. Worship the Lord with gladness.

Come before him with joyful songs. That is a qualifier. But it is not in how you do it. It's just, or rather, it's not in your skill level.

It's just to do it with gladness and joyfulness. Psalm 150, Praise the Lord, praise God in the sanctuary, praise him in his mighty heavens, praise him for his acts of power, praise him for suppressing greatness, praise him with the sounding of the trumpet, praise him with the harp of the lyre, praise him with timbrel and dancing, praise him with the strings in the pipe, praise him with the clash of cymbals, praise him with resounding cymbals, let everything that has breath praise the Lord, praise the Lord.

There are no, if you sing beautifully, praise the Lord. If you play the trumpets like Miles Davis, you may praise God.

It may sound like I'm contradicting our friend Tony's message from last week. I'm not. He's right. There are passages about playing skillfully and becoming masterful at that craft, at the craft. That is true.

If that is your calling, build your skill with faithfulness and focus if that is what you have set your heart to do. But that does not disqualify the rest of us from also playing or dancing or singing or, or, or.

But this leads me to something more specific. In the world that we know, creativity, in fact, almost always, gets celebrated in what people do, in what's visible.

In fact, a majority of westernized nations, we highlight creativity in such a scaled way that we honor the best creativity by almost exclusively putting it behind a paywall.

You won't see a Van Gogh unless you go to pay for it in a museum. You largely can't see a ballet, an opera, a show, etc. without a level of socioeconomic placement.

A word on this. Do I think that people who have developed their skills and talents professionally should be paid and even paid well for those things? I do.

I think that the arts should be funded publicly and privately. And I'm not even mad that there are people who can afford high level access.

What has happened though is that in our westernized approach to these things, we have made them exclusively accessible.

And it has created a culture in which some people are talented, and so they're allowed to be creative, and those that are not talented are not allowed to try.

As a music instructor, I meet adults all the time that say things like, I always wanted to learn the piano, but my sister was a talented one.

Those two ideas are not related. I always wanted to learn the piano is one idea. My sister was really talented is another.

They are not related, but we have tied them together. We have tied talent to creativity.

You are allowed to explore creativity. There is no gate. There is no paywall. You are allowed to explore it.

We connect talent to creativity because we look at what people have produced. Someone is often deemed creative because they did something and likely did it more than once.

But it didn't start with the thing that was produced. It began somewhere else.

Creativity starts with how you approach something, how you think about it, how you see it. Creativity begins with the ideas.

And we all have those. So I'm going to invite us to pray before we move forward from here.

Lord, as we go forward into this conversation about creativity and how it relates to how we turn our hearts and affections towards you, God,

I pray that you would open our hearts and minds up to this conversation.

The inner critic, the inner voice, and even the things that we've carried around with us have told many of us that creativity is something we are not invited to.

And that it is certain people that are allowed to do it. But I'm asking you, God, if you would tear down those assumptions and even the rules that we have built up around those things.

And that you would give us a freedom to explore in you. So we ask for your blessing on this conversation and that you would transform us through it as well.

We pray this in your name. Amen.

So ideas. We all have ideas. We all get to have ideas. What we do with the ideas once we have them or are offered them, that matters.

So I'm going to give you two things that I want us to hang on to. Ideas are around us all the time and we may even have them.

But they can often sit and rot if we don't do something with them.

I want to explore curiosity. It is a lost art.

We have lost an ability to ask questions and pull at threads. Social and news media feed us exactly what we've asked it to or what someone's paid to tell us.

We have become consumers and we accept what's been served.

And maybe this is because some of us grew up in a generation where your parents are like, you will eat what you are given or you will not eat at all.

But we do on a social news media level, we have built the algorithm and we have accepted what has been served to us.

And we largely let those things become our opinions or those facts that we accept or conclusions or style or we absorb.

We consume and absorb. I'm going to call out Andy for a second, which he's going to love.

But Andy is a fabulous example of curiosity. It's somebody who pulls at these threads.

And this is why he will often hear something in a sermon or a book or an interview and he will track it down.

If a book is mentioned, he will go out and look it up or he will get the book.

He is curious and he lets ideas find a place of interest for him.

I'm totally celebrating in that view. He's so embarrassed right now.

But with Andy, he lets his curiosity lead him down the road of exploration, which is the next piece.

Curiosity is one thing. We can ask a lot of questions. Where do we go with it?

Exploration, also known as play. Adults have forgotten how to play.

Perhaps when you are given something to consume, perhaps you are still a question asker.

But not everybody explores the questions or the threads of interest.

It makes them step into more curiosity, trying things out, seeing how they look or work.

Bobby McFerrin is one of my most favorite musicians.

A lot of you may know him because of Don't Worry Be Happy. He is so much more than that.

Bobby McFerrin did an album with the pianist Chikoria called Play.

McFerrin reflects on how when you take music lessons, they use the word play.

But often it is only used after you build skill. But play does not need skill.

Skill will enhance how we play, but it is not contingent on it.

Play is what we do with curiosity as we explore, to see what things do, how they work,

how they relate, what happens when, what will happen if I do this.

I ask questions, what will happen if.

I'm talking about a lot of relatable things here, referring to media input and what we do with it.

But what I'm talking about are the seeds of creativity.

By the way, and this will come as no surprise to anyone, but children are the teachers in this area.

Any time at all with a child will loop you endlessly through this.

This curiosity exploration, curiosity exploration loop.

If you spend any time with a kid during a day, you will watch that in cycle over and over again.

They are brilliant at it. They are masters at it.

Also, if you have any familiarity with the three-year-old stage, you are undoubtedly also familiar with the three-year-old starter pack,

fully equipped with the question of why, why, why, why, why, why.

But this is an amazing question. I know it gets a lot, it becomes a lot.

But I love that kids are absolutely on a bash. They want to know more.

So they're going to ask. They're curious.

And then they absolutely will explore what you have answered them.

They will explore that answer.

But this loop that we see kids cycle through, we simply call it playing.

But the breakdown is there, and I have been explicit about the breakdown of curiosity and exploration,

because I'm talking to a room mostly full of adults.

And we've forgotten. We need to review the process.

But this should tell us something.

This recognition that children are the masters at this, it tells us that this process is innate.

It is core to who we are. Creativity is built into our design.

Guys, you are creative.

You don't need to become creative. You are creative.

God has started you there. You have been creative.

You have a baseline for it. You were a child once.

This was your life.

But we have moved away from it. We just, we have stopped practicing.

It didn't go away. Those muscles are just not strong anymore.

So what happens to it?

Well, for various reasons, from within and outside of ourselves, we become self-conscious,

and it steals something from us.

Madeline Lengel may be a familiar name to you.

Whoever read A Wrinkle in Time?

Oh, I'm surprised that there aren't more.

Those of you who are raising your hands, you're probably surprised as well.

A Wrinkle in Time is a stunning book.

Ava DuVernay also directed a movie of it a number of years ago that was really,

it was beautiful to see.

She, so Madeline Lengel, she published her, she was an astounding writer,

just produced so much work, really, really good work.

She published her journals from a period of time in which she and her husband,

children and grandchildren spent summers together at the house she and her husband called Crosswix.

Also, if you haven't thought about naming your house before today,

I would encourage you to have a household meeting about that and make that happen,

because that's a pretty great thing.

Incidentally, mine is called The Urban Cottage, if you're wondering.

I don't know that you are.

But she has four of these journals out, and the first one is called A Circle of Quiet,

and it has been a creative north star for me for a number of decades.

In it, she writes this, and this is a bit of a passage, it's a couple, it's a few paragraphs,

but I follow along the main thread.

She writes, in reflection of the time that they were all together,

this was the first time I'd been forced to think consciously about creativity

in connection with little children, rather than the older ones for whom I often write.

I was trying to think out loud about the concentration essential for all artists,

and in the very little child, I found a perfect example.

The concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline.

In real play, which is real concentration, the child is not only outside of time,

he is also outside of himself.

He has thrown himself completely into whatever it is that he is doing.

A child playing a game, building a sandcastle, painting a picture, is completely in what he is doing.

His self-conscious is gone, his consciousness is wholly focused outside of himself.

She goes on to say, I had just witnessed this in Crosswix,

observing an 18-month-old lying on her stomach in the grass,

watching a colony of ants, watching with total spontaneous concentration.

And I had played Ring Around the Rosie with her.

We skipped around in a circle, grandparents, parents, assorted teenagers, wholly outside of them,

holding hands, falling and abandoned onto the lawn, joining the child's shrieks of delighted laughter.

And with her, we were outside self and outside time.

When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware.

We must throw ourselves out first.

This throwing ourselves away is an act of creativity.

So when we wholly concentrate, like a child in play or an artist at work,

then we share in the act of creating.

We not only escape time, we also escape our self-conscious selves.

When we trade in our self-consciousness, we are freed up.

Think about the first thing I had us do this morning.

How many experience self-consciousness?

The inner voices that immediately made you pause and consider if this was something that you could do.

Even while you began drawing, were you self-critical?

Why are these important observations to make?

And why is recognizing the value of creativity important?

The practice of creativity is very much kingdom work.

Creativity draws us outside of ourselves.

This is a series on worship that we've been doing,

and at the House we regularly say that worship is turning our hearts and affections towards God.

We come together to do this, but we can also worship outside of this space with less people.

Let me be clear, both matter. It's not an either or.

Both are critical.

But creativity draws us out of ourselves.

Because you can imagine, and even put yourself back in if you can, to those places.

I mean, Eric's question this morning, what were you obsessed with as a child?

Do you remember how much time you lost doing that thing?

How much time did you lose playing Star Wars or playing with your cars or playing outside,

and all of a sudden the sun is going down, and you're like, it was just noon.

How did that happen?

As a child, you abandon yourself to that.

You are wholly outside of yourself.

Kids say crazy things, and you're like, how are you not aware?

Because they have lost that need to be self-conscious.

Or not lost, they have not gained it yet, right?

What a gift. What a gift.

But once we become adults, we just become completely wrapped in this.

We become completely wrapped in our self-conscious.

And we need something to draw us outside of ourselves.

A practice of curiosity and exploration, play, does that.

And isn't that an essential piece of how we allow ourselves the freedom to worship God?

Creativity also gives our mind pliability.

That's important.

Christ introduced an entirely new idea to us and invited us to a life in which we love others,

we think of others as better than ourselves, and we recognize that love was the fulfillment of the law.

And how many couldn't break out of the previous thinking that the Old Testament taught them,

that the Old Scriptures taught them, how many couldn't step away from that?

The New Testament is full of stories of the early church leaders constantly reminding people

that they no longer are slaves, that they are no longer having to live the way that they did.

You are new creations, the old is gone, the new has come.

We see that trouble even now, don't we?

Peter, his story in Scripture moves me probably the most out of anybody.

We see it in Acts 10 moving forward for a few chapters when he's confronted with recognizing

that God has welcomed Gentiles into his plan for salvation.

Those that adhered to the law thought, that's not in the Scriptures.

We're God's chosen people, we can't do something new.

But the Lord clearly told Peter, do not call anything impure that God has made clean.

And what a struggle that was for Peter.

When Peter was asked to apply this new truth among the body of God fearing Gentiles

that God immediately called him to go visit, he says to them,

you are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile,

but God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or unclean.

And Peter certainly got flack for it, he had to go back to the church in Antioch and make an account for himself.

He was brought in for questioning.

And so Peter relayed the account, he retells the story.

And it says, when they heard this, they had no further objection and praised God, saying,

so then, even to Gentiles, God has granted repentance that leads to life.

God doing new things is hardly unprecedented.

Even Isaiah 43, 18, 19, Isaiah had to remind the people, forget the former things.

Do not dwell on the past. See, I'm doing a new thing.

Now it springs up using a water reference.

It springs up, it's refreshing, it's new, it's clean.

Do you not perceive it?

Our minds and our hearts must be pliable to be formed into Christlikeness

and to be movable with the new things that God is doing around us.

And lastly, creativity is critical to the kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven.

Kingdom thinking, it must be creative.

I regularly think about the people in the Bible that had to practice such holy imagining on such a regular basis.

Everything was new. Everything was being reinvented.

It was this practice that provided space for the kingdom of God to be ushered in.

Jesus' telling of the parables are exactly this.

I want you to reimagine with me another way, is what Christ did with the parables.

What you thought you knew is not what you thought you knew.

Or you think about the prophets who had to come up with creative ways to tell their stories,

to bring the truth forward, to make it really apparent to the people that were completely overlooking things.

The prophets who told their stories through methods that would grab attention in the most specific of ways,

dressing in sackcloth and ashes and standing on corners, retelling stories and bringing truths forward.

The kingdom of God is so outside of our current world in that it is such a different paradigm,

that we must approach it with wonder and awe and curiosity and a willingness to explore.

This curiosity helps us also move into love and compassion for others when we are willing to ask questions

about what we think we are seeing and we can move and explore possibilities of other paradigms

of what may be the case for them or our city or even ourselves.

If our minds are not pliable with a regular practice of curiosity and exploration and play,

we will find ourselves in such a stuck fixed mindset versus a growth one

and we will find that participation in a kingdom that is continually inviting us to join in what God is doing now

will simply pass over us.

We won't be able to accept the invitation because we won't be able to move with it.

That is a very sobering idea.

Can we afford to do that?

I'm going to have you do a second activity.

Hopefully you are less scared of it.

I'm going to give you a few minutes and I'm going to ask you to do this on your paper.

I'm going to ask you to write down ideas.

They may be yours, ideas you've had, or they may be ideas that you've been offered and you are interested in.

It could be something like, I want to know more about the Roman Empire that everybody's been talking about.

I want to know more about this.

This is something that came my way.

That's an idea that's new to me.

Or an idea that you have that's been generated in you.

I know that you're already thinking like, ideas about what?

About anything.

And I mean anything.

You're already editing yourself, I know.

It can be, like I said, a new idea or an idea you come across, something you've thought about this week,

a project you want to do, what you want to name your house.

And I'm going to ask you just to write down the idea.

Start there and don't edit it.

Don't try to come up with reasons why it's not a good idea.

It's just an idea.

It's neutral.

So let that just be the case.

Do not qualify it.

Because ideas and evaluation of those ideas are two different things.

That's an important thing to keep in mind.

Having an idea and evaluating idea are two different steps.

So just don't try to develop it, don't critique it, don't do anything with it.

Just write down ideas.

This may be such an interesting idea to you in that you can think, I don't know the last time I had an idea.

I don't practice ideas.

I don't practice this.

Huh.

That is an interesting thing to realize in this moment.

Do not think to yourself, well, I can't write that.

That's not a good enough one.

Again, we are not qualifying.

I didn't say write down an idea with a plan that's realistic to accomplish this year.

I said write down an idea, something you want to think about more.

So go ahead and do that. I'm going to give you some time to do that.

Okay.

We're going to keep the music going, but I'm going to add another element to this.

So now I want you to add some curiosity to that idea.

Ask the idea a question.

So, you know, when you were younger, you got the who, what, where, when, why, how.

Those are good starting points.

You don't have to answer all of them.

But pick one to help you be curious about that idea.

Whether it's why am I interested in this?

Is it tied to other things I like?

Where did I first hear about this idea?

Who told me about it?

Who's involved in this idea?

Who were the players of the thing that I'm thinking about?

Use those questions to ask the idea questions.

Does that make sense?

So take a few moments to do that.

By the way, we are not judging the idea.

This is not the evaluation.

It's just the curiosity.

So, I'm going to take a few moments to do that.

The last thing I'm going to ask you to do with this is explore it a little bit.

Draw some fuller thoughts of what you could do with this idea.

Not necessarily what you could physically make out of the idea, but what could you do with this idea?

That could be like, I could read a book.

I could research on it.

I could find a website.

I could, I could, I could.

How can you play with this idea?

Maybe you've got garden plans and you've got some ideas.

So how can you play with that?

When can you play with it?

Think about those things for a moment.

How can you explore this idea?

If you are cool with it?

I have a daily reminder alarm set on my phone that asks me what are your ideas?

And it is the reminder that I want to explore things.

That I need to keep curiosity practiced and I need to explore things and keep play practiced.

That is not something, again, that we do on the regular.

And I want to build that muscle in all areas of my life.

That I have curiosity that is well strengthened and that I don't forget how to play.

I don't forget how to explore.

Often, what happens when we follow the thread of curiosity into the play exploration stage,

we find that that naturally starts looping on its own.

It gains momentum.

We find that we become well on our way to making.

Curiosity often leads us to gather some materials to play with and explore with.

I don't mean that necessarily physically, sometimes that's more ideas like what we just talked about.

But curiosity will lead us to gather some materials, basically some kindling, and to try some things out.

And then we gain more curiosity now that we've had more materials to add to the thing.

And it just keeps looping and looping.

You've got to get started, right?

So we add more things.

This is exactly how kids' forts are made, or when you got the box and you built a spaceship out of it,

and you kept adding more cardboard to it to be the overdrive or whatever, I don't know, hyperdrive.

But my point is, this is how kids develop the stuff that is constantly filling the spaces of your house,

is that they keep adding stuff to it because they continue exploring.

So in this case, what would happen if I add this pot that my mom needs for dinner, my dad needs for dinner?

What would happen if I add this to my spaceship?

And you've heard it, like, I'm using that spatula.

Please don't take it.

It's how we write books.

We just keep adding more sentences.

And what happens if this character would do this?

What happens if this idea goes this direction?

What happens if this character murders this person?

Oh my gosh.

Then you have a Stephen King novel.

This is how we learn to fix things in our home, or how feeding your friend's kids after school turns into community meal programs.

Curiosity.

When allowed curiosity, ideas were not evaluated yet, but given the ability to be curious and to follow a curiosity thread,

when those things move to exploration, that's what creates the things that we see around us.

It is okay to be curious and play, by the way, without producing something.

But by the nature of what it is, that's probably rare.

God has made us creators.

He's made you creative.

You already are.

If you ever say to yourself again, I'm not creative, you have completely denied yourself.

You are creative, because God has built that into you.

It's just a muscle that has gone atrophied.

So with all of this, imagine if we all believed that we could apply this energy into how we turn our hearts and affections towards God and to life in the kingdom.

I love that thought.

I love that idea.

So how do we do something with that?

Well, here, we've changed our room up a little bit.

We've put sketchbooks on the table.

There are materials that you can use.

You can also bring some.

You can use the sketchbooks on the table each week to follow threads of curiosity and to explore those ideas as they come up in our gathering time.

Let the spirit lead you on that stuff.

It is okay to use those while other things are happening, by the way.

I find that if I'm attending a gathering in which there's singing and prayer, I usually don't end up singing.

I usually spend the time writing or drawing.

That's how I engage in that time.

And you're welcome to do that as well.

At home, you're allowed to ask the Bible questions.

You're allowed to talk back to it and explore it and play with ideas.

Ask the spirit questions.

The spirit is with us constantly.

Ask questions all the time.

Explore ideas with the spirit.

The spirit, I find, is so playful.

And I mean that in the most honoring way.

The spirit is not bound by what we think.

You know, like the spirit is not bound by a self-consciousness because the spirit is so unified.

God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit.

There's such unity there that the spirit is fully free.

And if you engage with the spirit, the spirit is playful and it is explorative and it is moving constantly.

And there are new things always changing and things to explore and new roots to go down.

Life in the spirit is a life of playfulness, I think, and it's a life of exploration.

That can feel scary, I understand, because we're mostly adults in here.

And this idea of like, oh my gosh, what if I lose myself?

Yeah.

I think that's the point we've been making.

But ask the spirit questions.

Look for revelation around you in the natural world.

Romans in the Psalms constantly tell us that God is revealing itself to us constantly through the natural world.

What a beautiful place to be ignited to think and be curious and explore and to play.

God is being revealed always, and you can respond with your full heart and your attention through these means.

You can also do this in the work that you do.

And I'm not talking about our jobs, though that is under the umbrella of work to some degree.

But the work that we are about around us and the life we are about around us,

the work of friendships and home building and life building and the other things that we are setting our time to,

we can do that in a similar way that Lengel talked about in regards to the child.

Unconscious of ourselves, outwardly looking, drawn out of ourselves.

We can be drawn out of ourselves and be reoriented towards the life of God in and around us in all these areas.

And so when I talk about worship and creativity,

I don't just mean the things that we have applied that to in our common vernacular,

because creativity is so much far beyond that.

Curiosity and exploration can be applied to everything.

You tend to find that people who are deemed the creative ones may be a little bit more practiced in it.

And that's why they tend to be the ones identified that way,

because they're the ones that are engaged in it more regularly,

but that does not exclude others from participating.

So I'm going to invite you this week to just be brave and to be willing to be unselfconscious.

Not unconscious, but unselfconscious.

Unless you're resting, of course. We value that.

I'm going to encourage you to entertain ideas and then be curious about them and be willing to play.

Play this week. Find ways to play.

And let that loop sort of take you in.

Let the Spirit take you into that loop this week as you become completely drawn out of yourself.

And even finding yourself potentially, I would even think,

engaged in the kingdom in new ways around you this week because of this openness to curiosity and exploration and play.

Let's pray.

God, I thank you so much for your Spirit and the way you are here to assist us,

to equip us, to guide us, and to lead us in the ways of becoming unselfconscious, as it were.

I'm so glad, too, that as we, our attention is drawn outside of ourselves,

it's not like we're spinning in circles trying to find a place to orient.

I mean, you are our orientation.

And as we are drawn out of ourselves in our walk with you,

this just helps us turn our hearts and affections towards you more in,

not just when we're gathered together, but in all areas of our life.

So we just really need your help with that.

For those of us who spend time with young people,

help us be really good learners around our teachers with these young people.

For those of us who just don't, that's not an opportunity that exists,

I pray that you remind us of the ways that we used to do things,

the way we used to completely throw ourselves into this curiosity and exploration play loop,

and what that did for us, what that meant to us.

And help us build those muscles back up again.

We, I mean, I think that this is critical to the kingdom.

This is critical to seeing others come to know you.

So Lord, we need your help with it.

We need your, yeah, we need your help with this.

And so we give this new idea to you, or we give you these ideas,

and we ask that this week you help us move forward into reformation of our minds.

And yeah, we're so grateful for your presence with us and your walk with us, God.

We pray this in your name, amen.