Creative Beings

Mankind is unique among the creatures of the earth. We are creative beings: we build, we draw, we paint, we write. And why wouldn’t we? We are made in the image of the ultimate Creative Being.

God thought up wondrous things and spoke them into being. On this planet we see a great variety of flowers, birds, fish, mammals, and more. The variety of life forms on earth were limited only by God’s imagination.

So we too, as creative beings, are limited only by our imagination. Nowhere is this more evident than in the writings of fantasy authors. Within the pages of fantasy we find elves and oliphants, dwarves and dragons, boggarts and balrogs, fauns and fairies, and even more fantastical but less-known creatures, all spawned by the imagination of the author.

This brings me to a question. If we write about creatures that exist only in our imaginations, does that make our writings any less valuable than true-to-life novels? If your answer is "Yes," I am interested in hearing your reasons.

I would also like to pose a scenario. Think about the sea creatures and birds that God created on the fifth day. Come the morning of the sixth day, they woke up to find some new creatures walking around on land. This was unheard of the day before! I can just imagine the birds saying, "The only creatures on earth are those that swim in the sea or fly in the air. What are these things walking around on four legs on the land? These are fantastical creatures indeed!"

And yet, God’s imagination had only begun expressing itself. His crowning creation—man—was yet to rise from the dust. "What now is this?" the birds ask. "What is this thing walking around on two legs, with no feathers and no fur? What? He is to rule over us? How can this be? He wasn’t created on the fifth day. He isn’t one of us."

I hope you agree that this sounds quite ridiculous. God did not intend to stop creating when evening fell on the fifth day. I wonder how many different, "fantastical" beings He might have created if He did not stop after day six.

The fact is that He did choose to stop there. But He has placed His creative spirit within each of us, and we carry on the business of creating in innumerable ways.

Writers of fantasy step outside the borders of what is considered normal. They dream up beings and worlds and physical forces that do not exist in this world at this time. But who is to say that such beings, worlds, and forces will not exist at some time in the future? Perhaps on the "sixth day" of our future, we will see things we did not expect.