Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous – how well I know it.
Psalm 139: 14
You’re responsible for leading a group of people; maybe a few people, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands.
God built all of those people. He knows them. He knows their dreams and their deepest fears. He knows how they hold themselves back. He breathed their potential into them.
You’re also responsible for some aspect of the physical environment of your company; maybe just your office, or maybe millions of square feet spread across several continents.
God built every grain of sand that became the cement that became the walls that surround your working environments. God dwells there, in the walls of your shop floors and break rooms and conference rooms.
And, finally, you’re responsible for your culture; for ensuring that all the interactions between your people in your physical spaces are not just net positive, but inspiring.
God invented human interaction. He made more than one of us so that we could keep company with one another! And, he made the substance of our physical environments such that we could have fertile ground for being in relationship with others.
All of this to say –
God is infinitely creative. And, he wants and needs you to tap into his infinite creativity so that you may lead his people, his environments, and his cultures according to his perfect, loving will.
You may not consider yourself creative. But consider this –
God dwells in you. Which means that his creativity dwells in you, too.
Last week, you learned The Prayer of Receptiveness for Servant Leaders.
This next prayer is the message that I use to help me access my God-given creativity when I’m truly “stuck”; when I’m feeling like the least visionary and creative person on the planet. Which is quite often!
My hope is that this prayer can serve you to remember your creativity, just as it serves me to remember mine.
The Prayer of Creativity for Servant Leaders
Dear Lord,
No matter how experienced I become, no matter how much I learn, develop, and prepare, leadership is still plain intellectually hard. There are so many challenges, moving parts, and conflicting demands.
Sometimes, I feel like my mind simply isn’t up to this responsibility.
Sometimes at night I lay awake, searching for creative solutions to challenges that seem unsolvable.
I don’t want to lay awake at night anymore, Lord – unless it’s to keep closer company with you. Please, help me understand how to see what I’m not seeing, to grasp solutions that are eluding me.
I know that there is always a way to manifest your perfect, pleasing will in every situation, in every challenge. I believe that I can personally become a wider channel for the Holy Spirit to come into this world through how I lead.
But God, I need your help.
I’m not feeling particularly creative right now. In fact, I feel utterly spent.
I ask you, Lord, to breath your creativity into me. I ask you to help me still and soften my mind and body so that I can hear and feel your intention in this especially complicated problem I’m grappling with.
[Now, tell God about the issue you’re struggling with. Walk him through how you came to be in this situation, step by step. Tell God the story. The Lord takes absolute delight in your leadership stories!
As you talk, don’t hold back. You don’t have to be linear. You can ramble. You can backtrack. You can interrupt yourself. You can even contradict yourself. Creativity is, in fact, forged through contradiction.
God will help you make sense of the contradiction and competing demands. As you talk, you will be supported to make connections, break through barriers, and weave together creative solutions for even your most complicated issues. Through bringing your challenges to God, you open the door to his contribution to your servant leadership. There is nothing God loves more than supporting you in this way; in deepening how you lead his creation to prosper, with joy.]
Thank you again, Lord, for helping me become the servant leader you created me to be.
I’ll talk to you again soon!
In your name I pray,
Amen
and he has filled him with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills—to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, Exodus 35:31-32
Trackbacks/Pingbacks