First off, if you haven’t seen the video for Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros’ song “Man on Fire”, please take the 4 minutes to check it out. I promise you won’t regret it!
I think this video speaks a lot to the benefits of a creative outlet. What differentiates (wo)men from (wo)men on fire is that creative outlet. Odds are these kids have school all day, homework, chores, and all kinds of other things in their lives. That’s what makes them men or women. They have obligations and stuff going on.
But what sets them on fire is having an outlet for their creative energy.
I think, particularly in my corner of the Mainline Protestant church, we can lose sight of this fire. We can lose sight of being creative in favor of the comfort and nostalgia offered by the days of old. But if we are truly living as people of Pentecost, as people marked with tongues of fire, then we must find ways to become people on fire.
And I don’t necessarily mean in that “on fire for the Lord” kind of way because that always weirded me out. But we need to have the fires of creativity stoked in our congregations in order to escape this circular pattern of “just getting by” as churches. One way we can thrive is to engage the creative energy of people of all ages to express how they see themselves in the world around them.
This video gives me home because it’s happening. It’s happening all around us. We know that it is not out of our realm of possibility. We’re actually doing it everyday. But it is always such an incredible thing to see such creativity compiled together in a video like this.
So what’s your outlet, creative or otherwise? What do you do [that isn’t an obligation] that helps you become a person on fire?
Cheers,
Eric
Eric Clapp 4.0 
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