Ready-Made World

"When the Lord your God has brought you into the land that he swore to your ancestors...to give you—a land with fine, large cities that you did not build, houses filled with all sorts of goods that you did not fill, hewn cisterns that you did not hew, vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant—and when you have eaten your fill, take care that you do not forget the Lord..."

~ Deuteronomy 6:10-11

I've been thinking a lot lately about how humans are amazingly creative creatures.  Human imagination and physical skills are the source of so much that is around us.  Perhaps so much so that too often we take most of the wonderful things we call "modern conveniences" in our lives for granted. 

Actually many modern conveniences are imaginative adaptations of ancient ones.  Rarely does a truly new idea or discovery come along.  In so many ways we are given and live in a ready-made world. This is both a blessing and a curse.

The blessing is that as individuals and communities we don't have to start over. As the old expression goes, "we don't need to reinvent the wheel."  Countless intelligent, imaginative people have come before us who have discovered, adapted, created and left behind a world filled with art, industry, and institution.  Each of us is born into a ready-made world that we don't have to create.

This is where the curse comes in.  Because so much is handed to us from the beginning at least two dynamics come into play.  The first is that for many people so much is provided for us we lose our creative edge or use our imagination to create in negative or superfluous ways.  Our innate human creative nature becomes dull or dark.  The second dynamic is the assumption that everyone comes into the same ready-made world, that others have the same opportunities and advantages we have. The truth is some people's worlds are more ready-made that others.  In fact many people are born into worlds filled with the the dark, negative residue of the lost and misplaced imagination of others.

We live in a ready-made world.   Everything is a gift, even the imagination we use to create more. Many may think we hit a triple when we were actually born on third base.   Our challenge is to take the ready-made, innate, incarnate, God-given world and creatively adapt it for the common good of all which is the glory of God.