Sitting on the bed—48 hours awake now—forcibly burning sequential utility into my memory. How will I buy bread tomorrow?
Beginning is always the hardest part. This is true of writing, of friendship, of moving to a new place.
The beauty begins soon after when the creation begins to flow. Connections fire off in the brain, interests are shared, secret places are discovered.
Growing excitement as familiar thoughts develop new names.
Engineering homework is no exception. The thought of the perfectly quadrille paper with its strictness, a blank canvass where only one plane is correct. It seems to challenge me from where it lies cast on the floor. Even my choice of pencil seems black and white—I will need all the help I can get to fill the squares correctly. Reread the question, glance at the clock, a sleepless night is inescapable now.
Slowly, the concepts flow, choppy at first, growing in confidence. Cul-de-sacs and detours lead me through the index of several textbooks. False hopes of a solution give me bursts of energy which die away as I recognize some deeper level of complexity. Hair and keyboard slowly becoming greasy from the hands which move between. Facebook resolutions are made, broken, remade, and broken again. Time passes faster as the work slows.
Starting to speak a new language, muscles unaccustomed to juxtapositioning such sounds.
Human beings come preprogrammed with the desire to create. We must fill the space around us, leave a mark. We start by imitating the world around us, first roughly, growing in detail as our fingers gain skill. A pile of Legos becomes a house, which becomes a neighborhood, which becomes an X-Wing fighter, mounting an assault on the Death Star. Creation is simultaneously looking into the future and back to the past, but it is never still. When momentum is lost, the self-examination begins:
Why am I doing this right now? Why do I create? Am I adequate for this job? Is this part of His Plan, or my pride? Why does my life seem so compartmentalized?
Fear of being wrong, of being measured and found wanting.
The chair grows uncomfortable. Even the tea I’ve made for myself doesn’t work as well as I had hoped. The fluorescent buzz above my head reminds me that I should be asleep. I begin to wonder if I can finish, despairing even of knowing what ‘finished’ would look like. Staring at the ceiling, my momentum stalls as my breath quickens and the tenseness grows in my shoulders. “Fear and terror, in any form, will destroy creativity and people.”
How could I make such a dumb mistake? Resolutions. Late nights. Stepping out in conversation.
This semester, I’ve started offering up each assignment to God before I begin. I felt ridiculous there in the Unix lab with Psalm 90 open next to Duderstadt’s classic, Nuclear Reactor Analysis. Yet never have the words “Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love” rung more true than on a frigid trudge from a night spent at Redifer Commons, sun greyly rising over my back, illuminating clusters of windows on each building. In those times, having confronted my own sense of inadequacy and lack of trust, perfect love truly drives out the fears of the night.
Never has He abandoned me. Never have I been alone.
An entire culture is accelerating through my desperately grasping fingers. I strain to hear the now-familiar syllables through the sterile terminal; each brings a beloved face to my mind. The whole of a language is greater than the sum of its constituents; the end goal—relationship—is indeed love itself.
Fujimura concludes his thoughts with the climax: Therefore we cannot create but by sacrificial love. What a profound statement! For how can we love, except to follow timidly in the steps of our Savior, who has shown us the extent of love through his sacrifice of existence’s greatest treasure—Himself. Any effort disconnected from the Branch will wilt away, and in the light of the Son, the only response is to soar ever higher in the knowledge that love has won my victory.
SDG
Original Article:
http://www.makotofujimura.com/writings/a-letter-to-a-young-artist/
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