Only one miracle is recorded in all four gospels authored by Jesus’ closest associates. The miracle of the five loaves and two fish is called a Creative Miracle. Five thousand men and their wives and children were fed from a young boy’s lunch. When Jesus saw that His vast audience was hungry, He told His disciples to feed them. The perplexed disciples timidly offered the one creative idea before them—a young lad’s lunch. How do we cultivate the environment for a creative miracle? Over the next two days we will look at 4 ideas to get you started:
#1 Cultivate your curiosity! How? Curiosity is defined as a desire to learn; a spirit of inquiry and an interest in others. I believe this miracle appears in all four Gospels for two reasons: first, a child with very little to offer took interest in others. Second, these gospel writers participated in the miracle themselves. As Jesus multiplied the lad’s lunch, their curiosity and interest compelled the disciples to participate in God’s creative miracle! Could it be that simple curiosity is the creative pathway to your miracle?
#2 Cultivate a lifestyle of participation. Allow yourself to get involved with God’s creative process. In this account, a seemingly insignificant child solved a crisis for 5,000 men plus their wives and children. A young boy with only his lunch! Could it be that this kingdom belongs to the children, as the Bible says, because children have the potential to receive all the possibilities that God offers?
Scripture: Matthew 14:15-18, Mark 6:35-44, Luke 9:12-17, John 6:5-13
I remember one of our events just north of the Arctic Circle in the city of Murmansk. A hockey rink had been secured for our conference. The main speaker had only one request—that we never put him on a platform that didn’t allow seating directly in front. When I arrived at the venue just hours before our opening, I was horrified to find that not one chair had been placed in front of the platform!
I had less than 2 hours to find seating, and the owner of the stadium was not in the mood to help. Glancing at the platform, I saw dozens of risers stacked to the side. Seeing my solution, I directed the workers to distribute the risers across the open floor. The audience quickly filled them up just before the speaker arrived.
The owner of the stadium was so impressed with our innovative thinking that by the next morning he had filled the floor with hundreds of chairs free of charge! His comment was, “if these people wanted seating this badly, I was determined to give them the best!”
Remember: Sometimes the simplest solution is the best solution!
As a young businesswoman, I remember sitting at my desk after having just received accolades for a very successful business deal that people of my age seldom experienced.
The president of the bank and my peers thought it was amazing, yet I sat there thinking, “I’ve obtained what people seek after for years…but is this what I want to do with the rest of my life?
As I was pondering this decision the phone rang. It was a local Pastor calling, and I remember telling him, “Funny you should call right now…I am pondering what to do with the rest of my life.” I recall his words so clearly. He simply said, “Let peace be the umpire of your heart.”
Hanging up the phone, I leaned back and thought, “Stay here? For the rest of my life?” NO joy, NO Peace! And in that moment I decided to pursue a second career. Perhaps today, you need courage to follow your heart.
Consider this: My mother-in-law always said, work at your career for 5 years, if you find yourself bored, then do something else. Her observation: boredom was the great thief of happiness. Life is too short to be bored!
According to the Holy Scriptures, King Solomon was considered to be the wisest and richest King who ever lived. He had all the power, riches, wine and women he could ever desire. He pursued the essence of happiness and his sad conclusion is found in a book called Ecclesiastes. He found only emptiness. His verdict on pursuing happiness? Who needs it!!
We conclude that he was searching for happiness in all the wrong places. If that’s so, where do we find happiness? Many have reached the same conclusion as Augustine, a powerful 3rd-century noble, who pursued women and wine. He said, “Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible!”
Walking down one of the streets he had frequented before, a local harlot called out, “Augustine, it is I! It is I!” Augustine responded, “It is not I! It is not I!” Why? He had discovered a new identity for himself!
Recently, I was moved by a letter I received from a family whose daughter is seeking higher education. An everyday person just like you, she had lost sight of her dream. In the mundane routine of life, she had lost hope. What do you do when it seems like hope is lost or when it seems that your dream is a thousand miles away?
You can develop Creativity habits essential to cultivating the dream that is in your heart! How?
- Create your own Inspiration Book using bright and beautiful pictures! Gather pictures from magazines, advertisements or the newspaper. Paste the images on a dream-board or in a book—let them speak new possibilities to your heart. Their symbolism can expand your horizons.
- Momentarily change your surroundings! If you are facing discouragement on the pathway to your dream you may need inspiration! Use a simple change in environment to stimulate your curiosity and increase productivity in thought. Do this throughout your day!
- Rely upon the creativity of others! Contrary to popular opinion, most thoughts are not original but they are a conglomeration of all that we have heard, read and seen!
- Speak out or write out your thoughts! Get into the habit of capturing your thoughts throughout the day! This is one of the best ways to stimulate the creative process!
- Allow a sense of urgency to motivate your creativity! Don’t wait for tomorrow! Procrastination never brings out the best in life, it simply eats away at your life. Today, set some immediate deadlines!
Thomas Edison overcame adversity many times in his life. A classic example of this occurred in 1914, when a fire ravaged the phonograph factory at his West Orange, New Jersey complex. The 67 year-old Edison lost approximately $5 million that night – the equivalent of $75 million today. His son Charles raced to his father’s side, thinking the sight of the blazing factory would be too devastating for him. Instead, Charles was amazed to see his father smiling. He told his son, “Go get your mother! She’ll never have a chance to see anything like this again in her entire life!” Edison then called a meeting with his key staff members and immediately began organizing the recovery campaign. He urged his team to focus on rebuilding the phonograph factories in a way that “took advantage of the latest improvements in factory design.”
Edison’s response to the fire demonstrates his irrepressibly optimistic nature. As biographer Dr. Paul Israel describes it, “Where others might see disaster and failure, he was always optimistically looking for opportunities and seeing the possibility of new directions for improvements.”
“When you grow up in a developing country like India, as I did, you instantly learn to get more value from limited resources and find creative ways to reuse what you already have. Take Mansukh Prajapati, a potter in India. He has created a fridge made entirely of clay that consumes no electricity. He can keep fruits and vegetables fresh for many days. That’s a cool invention, literally.
In Africa, if you run out of your cell phone battery, don’t panic. You will find some resourceful entrepreneurs who can recharge your cell phone using bicycles. And since we are in South America, let’s go to Lima in Peru, a region with high humidity that receives only one inch of rainfall each year. An engineering college in Lima designed a giant advertising billboard that absorbs air humidity and converts it into purified water, generating over 90 liters of water every day. The Peruvians are amazing. They can literally create water out of thin air.” — Navi Radjou
It doesn’t matter where you are in life today, you can move forward because life itself declares that potential always exists. God always loves you and believes in you, so love yourself! Believe in yourself and get started!
Jesus was born in a manger, but He did not stay there. You might have been born in a poor family in a poor neighborhood, with poor neighbors and a poor education, but you do not have to stay there! There is no one limiting you. You are not a prisoner of your past, your neighborhood, your status or lack of education.
When Christ comes to live in you there is a new power in operation. You no longer live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud: A new power is in operation!
“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.”
Even though you might be starting off in an obscure place, there is a place in the sun waiting for you! They said of Jesus, “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” The answer is, Yes, the Savior of the world! A good thing is coming out of your city – YOU – because you and Jesus are a dynamic duo that can’t be defeated!
Scripture: Romans 8:2 (NKJV)
My husband, Kevin, shares his personal story on how he overcame adversity:
“When I was a young lad, an old Ford factory shift worker came to my grade school looking for boys who wanted to learn to play tennis. That idea jumped in me and I pursued it, despite having a bad case of pigeon-toed feet and starting the game with the racket in the wrong hand!
The coach made an instant determination that I would not make it. He devised a tournament to eliminate some of the boys whom he thought were hopeless and would not make the grade. I was scheduled to play the best player. I was facing immediate termination and it was assumed I would quietly disappear into the night.
However, the day before the tournament began, the star player was hit in the head by a baseball and knocked unconscious. The next day he couldn’t play, and I ended up winning the tournament, which turned the thinking of everyone upside down! Where they had seen no promise of success, they were now forced to acknowledge there was more than a promise of success!
That first tournament victory was followed by over 100 more! Those days of adversity prepared me for the challenges of today. I am confident that a living God can give an idea to every one of His chosen children, but it is critical what we do with it.
Follow your dream! Don’t let your pigeon-toed feet or lack of knowledge hinder your opportunity for victory! “You were running the race so well. Who has held you back from following the truth? It certainly isn’t God, for he is the one who called you to freedom.”
Scripture: Galatians 5:7-8 (NLT)
Have you ever been told you are not creative? Or has your creativity gone unrecognized? Take encouragement from these stories of people who persevered in the face of criticism and apathy:
Margaret Knight is remembered as “the female Edison.” She received 26 patents for a diversity of items such as a window frame and sash, machinery for cutting shoe soles, and even improvements to internal combustion engines! Her most significant patent was for machinery that would automatically fold and glue paper bags to create square bottoms, the results of which we still enjoy to this day. It is said that the workmen who were installing the equipment she invented refused her advice in the process because, “after all, what does a woman know about machines?”
In 1886 Josephine Cochran declared, “If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine, I’ll do it myself!” She proceeded to do so, inventing the world’s first practical dish-cleaning dishwasher. She unveiled her invention at the 1893 World’s Fair, expecting the public to embrace it. Unfortunately only the hotels and large restaurants were buying her ideas, and it was not until the 1950s that dishwashers became popular with the general public. Josephine Cochran’s machine was a hand-operated mechanical dishwasher, and she eventually founded a company to manufacture these washers. The company eventually became KitchenAid.
Marion Donovan was a young mother in the post-war baby boom era. She came from a family of inventors and had inherited their creativity. Unhappy with leaky, cloth diapers that had to be washed, she first invented the ‘Boater’, a plastic covering for cloth diapers she had made from a shower curtain.
A year later she carried her idea further, using disposable absorbent material and combining it with her Boater design. Marion Donovan had created the first disposable diaper.
Manufacturers were not interested in her design, saying her product would be too expensive to produce. Unable to sell or license her diaper patent, Marion Donovan went into business for herself. A few years later, she was able to sell her company for $1 million.
