This week, I used Betsy Ross’s pattern to cut a five pointed star with one snip.
In the picture book biography that I have, it says that Betsy suggested this to General Washington as a manufacturing hack to save time and material as they discussed the first flag of the United States of America.
My children and I enjoyed folding our squares of paper and then using the scissors to make one clean cut that resulted in a beautiful five pointed star. It made us laugh because it is so easy, so smart. Betsy’s ingenuity delights us still today, in addition to being efficient and wise.
Also, this week, I was asked to make cupcakes for a baby shower and decorate them with little stars of icing. The frosting gun and tip made my work easier, but it still took a labor of love to cover each little cupcake with myriads of tiny stars.
“…and He made the stars also…” Genesis 1:16 says, as a testament to the ease with which God simply spoke, causing all of the myriads of stars to jump into their places in the sky- even easier than one snip.
Our creative work is an echo of His, and we delight in the ingenuity, simplicity, beauty, and skill we see in the creative work of others because in it, we see the reflection of our Creator.
In C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle, the protagonists watch as a black shadow spreads across the night sky. Slowly, they realize that the stars are going out.
I can identify. Everywhere I look, I am bombarded with offers to let artificial intelligence do my thinking for me. My email, word processor, grocery shopping app, phone, and vehicle leave little need for ingenuity, creativity, or beauty. It’s the same as I look around my community.
No Betsy Ross efficiency delights us.
No labor-of-love tiny frosting stars show affection.
All of that is being lost in the hypnotic zombie stare we’re acquiring instead.
Brad Littlejohn, in his excellent article for Fusion, entitled, “The World After Reading,” wrote, “[Screen time] rewires the brain to render it ever less able to genuinely read and comprehend.”
Twenty years ago, the children who attended my Sunday school were bright, engaged, creative, and spunky. Their eyes shone with inquisitiveness, and even their naughtiness was creative.
Now, their children attend my Sunday school. Their eyes are dull. They cannot focus or ask questions. Many of them fall asleep. They speak in memes and movie quotes, never full sentences, and they regurgitate phrases from pop psychology and Miss Rachel as if it is the only meaningful thing they’ve ever heard.
Not one of them could think about folding paper in such a way as to be able to cut a star with one snip.
Not one of them would have the attention span to cover a cupcake in small frosting stars.
Even when told that God made the stars, they blink slowly and say, dream-like, that, yes, they saw stars on youtube once.
The Prophet Habakkuk warned the people: “What profit is an idol when its maker has shaped it, a metal image, a teacher of lies? For its maker trusts in his own creation when he makes speechless idols!”
We’ve only made more sophisticated idols that speak the lies we have taught them, and we are allowing them to decimate all of the opportunities we have to echo our Creator.
So, what’s the solution?
Habakkuk continues, “Woe to him who says to a wooden thing, Awake; to a silent stone, Arise! Can this teach? Behold, it is overlaid with gold and silver, and there is no breath at all in it. But the LORD is in His holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before Him.”
As we keep silence before Him, we can become the objects off of which His goodness echoes, producing the fire of creativity of which He is the spark. We can trust His breath, for He is a living God, breathing through us to create ingenuity, beauty, and love that has the power to change a spiritless world.
With one snip, we can cut off our dependence on the gods of our own making and trust again in the One who made us.
Sarah Dixon Young 