The Wonder of Creation
I have thought about Creation for most of my life.
Not simply about how the earth began, or how long a “day” in Genesis might have been, but about the larger mystery behind it all. Why does God create? Why is creation so beautiful? And why do we, His children, seem to possess such a persistent desire to create things ourselves?
The Bible begins with perhaps the simplest and most consequential introduction to God:
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”Genesis 1:1
Before we encounter Him as lawgiver, healer, judge, or deliverer, we encounter Him as Creator.
Then Creation unfolds through order. Light and darkness. Waters and land. Vegetation. The heavens. Living creatures. Finally, humanity.
And then comes the extraordinary declaration:
“God created man in his own image.”Genesis 1:27
I have often wondered whether our instinct to create is one small expression of what it means to bear the image of a Creator.
God’s Time and Ours
I do not know how long the “days” of Creation were, and I no longer feel a need to force them into our twenty-four-hour clock.
After all, our measurement of a day depends upon the rotation of the very Earth whose creation we are discussing.
Neal A. Maxwell once expressed something about time that I have always found profound:
“Time is clearly not our natural dimension. Thus it is that we are never really at home in time... Whereas the bird is at home in the air, we are clearly not at home in time, because we belong to eternity.”
I love that thought.
Perhaps some of our difficulty understanding Creation comes from trying to measure the works of an eternal God entirely with mortal instruments.
Science, meanwhile, has revealed a universe more ancient and magnificent than previous generations could have imagined. Our solar system formed more than 4.5 billion years ago. Stars existed before our sun, and the elements that eventually became planets, oceans, trees, animals, and our own bodies have a cosmic history stretching unimaginably far into the past.
I do not find any of that threatening to faith.
I find it breathtaking.
Science can help us investigate processes, matter, energy, life, and time. Scripture asks us to contemplate meaning, purpose, relationship, and God. I am comfortable allowing the questions to be enormous.
The more I understand, the more there is to wonder about.
Worlds Without Number
My faith makes the idea of Creation larger still.
God tells Moses:
“Worlds without number have I created.”Moses 1:33
And only a few verses later:
“As one earth shall pass away, and the heavens thereof even so shall another come; and there is no end to my works.”Moses 1:38
And again:
There is no end to my works.
Creation, then, is not merely an ancient event. It is an eternal principle.
Astronomy cannot prove the theological meaning of those words, and it does not need to. But every scientific discovery that expands our understanding of the universe also expands the landscape upon which I contemplate them.
We now know that our sun is one star among an almost incomprehensible number of stars, and that planets beyond our solar system are abundant.
The universe does not make me feel insignificant.
It makes existence itself feel miraculous.
We Create Too
Creation has been part of my life for as long as I can remember.
I create essays, books, stories, and screenplays. I write lyrics and make music. I photograph the world because sometimes I see something beautiful and feel an almost irresistible need to preserve it.
But I have come to understand that creativity is much larger than the arts.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf said:
“The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul.”
He taught that creation is not reserved for painters, writers, musicians, or people we traditionally call artists. We can create a garden, a home, a memory, laughter, knowledge, beauty, or something useful.
That understanding has changed the way I think about my own life.
I create when I make a home beautiful, peaceful, and welcoming.
I create when I prepare a delicious plate of food and think about its flavors, colors, and the people who will gather around it.
I create when I help make a place where children can grow surrounded by love, safety, curiosity, laughter, expectations, and the freedom to become themselves.
I create at work too. A healthy professional environment does not simply happen. People create it. We create trust. We create better systems. We solve problems. We teach. We create harmony without sacrificing excellence or accountability.
A teacher creates understanding.
A parent creates security.
A leader can create trust.
A friend creates belonging.
A writer creates worlds.
And sometimes a human being simply creates hope where there was none before.
Creation is not a profession.
It is a way of participating in life.
Keep Creating
There may even be practical wisdom in continuing to create throughout our lives.
Researchers studying aging have explored the concept of cognitive reserve, the brain’s capacity to respond flexibly to aging and neurological change. Research does not establish that creativity prevents dementia, and I would never make that claim. But studies have found associations between creative engagement, cognitively stimulating activity, and stronger cognitive functioning in older adults.
One study using data from 2,462 adults age 65 and older found that participation in creative activities was associated with better cognitive functioning. Other research has found relationships between creativity and cognitive reserve.
That fascinates me.
Writing requires memory, language, association, imagination, judgment and revision. Music asks us to recognize patterns and anticipate what might come next. Cooking, photography, gardening, learning a language, solving a problem, designing a room, studying history, or learning an instrument all ask the mind to continue working with possibility.
Perhaps one of the worst things we can tell ourselves as we grow older is that we are too old to begin.
I want to remain a beginner at something for as long as I live.
I want to keep asking questions. Keep learning things I am not good at yet. Keep changing my mind when I discover something I did not know. Keep making things that did not exist yesterday.
Growing older should not mean becoming finished.
Sometimes We Create Ourselves
There is another kind of creation that becomes more meaningful to me with time.
Sometimes the thing we are creating is our own life.
We make mistakes. We choose poorly. We trust people we perhaps should not have trusted. We remain in situations longer than wisdom would have advised. We suffer things we did not choose at all.
And eventually we stand somewhere we never expected to be, holding pieces of a life that no longer fit together in quite the same way.
But pieces are material too.
We cannot create another past.
We can create a different future.
We can become wiser without becoming harder. We can forgive without surrendering discernment. We can acknowledge our mistakes without allowing them to become our identity. We can allow suffering to teach us without allowing it to dictate the rest of our lives.
And then we can choose again.
We can choose who deserves a place close to us.
We can choose what kind of love we will accept and what we will no longer mistake for love.
We can choose the atmosphere of our homes, the values of our relationships, the work worthy of our energy, the voices we allow to influence us, and the dreams we are not finished dreaming.
Perhaps wisdom itself is creative material.
The past does not have to become the architecture of the future.
It can become its instruction.
And I think there is something profoundly divine in taking what life has handed us, including some broken pieces, and creating something beautiful anyway.
The Wonder of Seeing
Perhaps this is also why I photograph so much of God's world.
We have created astonishing cameras and increasingly sophisticated lenses, but I still believe there is no lens quite like the human eye.
A camera can record light.
But it cannot experience what it means to stand beneath that light.
It cannot completely capture the cold air, the moving clouds, the sound of water, the enormity of a mountain, the person beside us, or the memory suddenly awakened by a particular evening sky.
The eye receives light, the brain transforms signals into color, depth, pattern and form, and somehow we do something even more extraordinary.
We recognize beauty.
Knowledge does not diminish that beauty for me. Understanding something about wavelengths does not make a sunset less magnificent. Knowing something about astronomy does not make the stars less mysterious.
Quite the opposite.
The closer I look, the more astonishing Creation becomes.
Neal A. Maxwell once wrote something that captures this feeling beautifully:
“When we rejoice in beautiful scenery, great art, and great music, it is but the flexing of instincts acquired in another place and another time.”
Perhaps that is why beauty can sometimes feel strangely familiar.
A piece of music we have never heard can make us homesick for something we cannot name. A landscape we have never visited can somehow feel known. A night sky can make us feel both impossibly small and strangely at home.
Perhaps beauty awakens something ancient in us.
Perhaps we recognize more than we remember.
And perhaps our own desire to create beauty is part of that same inheritance.
There Is No End to His Works
I do not know exactly what creation will mean in eternity.
I do not know what will become of everything we learn here, our understanding of music, language, science, color, mathematics, storytelling, nurturing, building, healing, teaching, organizing, loving.
But I have difficulty believing that anything good we genuinely become is wasted.
Maybe the greatest thing created while writing a book is not the book.
Maybe it is the writer.
Maybe music creates the musician while the musician creates the music.
Maybe raising a child creates something in the parent too.
Maybe every worthy act of creation changes the creator.
And if eternal progression means becoming more like our Heavenly Parents, I cannot help wondering whether the creative capacities we develop here are preparation for possibilities we cannot yet comprehend.
Perhaps, one day, worlds.
I do not know.
And I don't need to know.
Wonder leaves room for mystery.
For now, I have this world. Christ taught that we are “not of the world,” but I have never understood that as a rejection of the world God created for us.
Perhaps what makes us strangers here is not the mountains, oceans, stars, music, laughter, or love, but the sorrow, cruelty, loss, temptation, and adversity through which mortality asks us to pass. The beautiful things feel different. Sometimes they feel almost like reminders of home, glimpses of something eternal placed within a temporary world, perhaps explaining why beauty can move us so deeply before we can even explain why.
So I want to keep creating within it.
Books and songs. Meals and memories. Beautiful rooms and better systems. Places where children feel loved. Workplaces where people feel respected. Relationships built with greater wisdom. A future chosen more carefully because of everything the past has taught me.
And I want to keep looking.
At oceans and mountains. At storms and stars. At children's faces. At morning light coming through an ordinary window.
Sometimes I will photograph them.
Sometimes I hope I have the wisdom to put the camera down and simply see.
Because perhaps our greatest creative work is not something we leave hanging on a wall, printed in a book, recorded in a song, or captured through a lens.
Perhaps it is what we make of the life entrusted to us.
To take knowledge and create wisdom.
To take suffering and create compassion.
To take mistakes and create discernment.
To take uncertainty and create faith.
To take a house and create a home.
To take years and create a life.
To take love and create something that outlives us.
And perhaps, after all our clocks have stopped and time is no longer the dimension in which we live, we will finally understand why the instinct to create was planted so deeply within us.
Maybe we were never merely learning how to make beautiful things.
Maybe we were learning how to become creators.
“There is no end to my works.”
What a magnificent promise for His people who belong to eternity.
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