As I sat down to write this month’s reflection, I was handed a pickle.  It’s not a real pickle.  It’s a red wooden peg from my daughter’s toy hammering set.  But for today, my daughter has declared it is a pickle and it is “yummy in my tummy.” 

I love seeing how inventive Addy can be now that she’s entered the stage of imaginative play.  Sticks become pickles.  Paper plates become steering wheels.  Stacking rings become cookies.  Two stepstools become a train.  A plastic bowl becomes a teddy-bear-size bathtub.

Virginia and I have tried to minimize the number of toys in our home’s play area.  At first, this decision was mostly about our extremely limited living room space.  We just don’t have room for a ride-on train or a full play kitchen with plastic food!  But now we’ve come to know an unexpected benefit of that limitation: we get to see much more of Addy’s creativity.  As I sit here holding this red wooden “pickle,” I am reminded of the proverbial saying, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”  We get creative when we recognize a need. 

Our Unitarian Universalist tradition is excellent at helping us recognize needs:

The need for human connection.

The need for peace and justice.

The need for space to ask questions.

The need for understanding.

The world is full of needs.  After all, need is what it means to be alive.  (Only non-living things have no needs.)  Our UU faith attunes us to the needs within and around us, and it calls us to get creative, to produce something that wasn’t there before in order to help meet those needs.

Do you think of yourself as a creative person?  If so, what has led to that self-understanding?  If not, why not?  When you encounter your own needs or the needs of the world, are you inspired – or do you find yourself in a creative rut?  What are we doing here at Tree of Life to cultivate our creativity, individually and as a congregation? 

I look forward to exploring these questions and more with you over the next few weeks!

In faith,

Rev Jenn Gracen

Interim Minister