The Heart of the Creator: Why the Automated World Is Reviving the Human Spark
Updated: 3 hours ago
Automated technology can write, calculate, analyze, imitate and generate at astonishing speed. Its arrival has me thinking about something we nearly forgot: what it means to be human.
This idea found me in the bathtub.
Apparently, that is where theology, technology and my content calendar have decided to start holding meetings.
I was thinking about the generative technology that has moved so quickly into everyday life—which is hardly unusual for me. I use these tools almost every day. I love what they can help me do. They help me research, organize ideas, untangle thoughts, learn new things and sometimes figure out what I have been trying to say when the words are somewhere in my head but refusing to cooperate.
I am hardly standing outside this technological shift criticizing it from a distance. I use these tools constantly myself.
We're living through one of those strange moments when technology does more than change what we can do. It makes us reconsider what we're here for.
For generations, we have built much of our world around productivity. We reward speed, accuracy and measurable output, while creative work is often treated as an extra—a nice hobby for after the “real work” is done.
Then the algorithms arrived, and suddenly we were living beside technology that can analyze enormous amounts of information, generate images and draft pages of text in seconds.
That can feel threatening. But I keep turning over a different question: what if handing some mechanical tasks to machines gives us more time for the deeply human ones?
We were never meant to spend our entire lives competing with calculators. We are makers, and I think that matters more now than ever.
The Mirror Is Missing a Soul
Generative technology is extraordinary, but it does not experience the world the way you and I do. These systems learn patterns from enormous quantities of human-created material and can recombine them in ways that are useful, surprising and sometimes genuinely beautiful. That is a real technological achievement.
The distinction becomes clearer when you think about the life behind the work. A generative system can produce an image about grief without ever grieving. It can describe a sunset without having evening light suddenly pull an old memory to the surface, write about love without loving anyone, or render a sunflower without having a reason to paint one.
A machine may be able to generate an image, but it cannot have the moment that made a human need to paint one.
That is the distinction I care about.
A computer has no childhood to remember, no body carrying experience through the world, and no heartbreak or hospital-room prayer tucked into its history. It has never heard an old song and suddenly been seventeen again. It can describe those moments because people have described them, but it does not live them.
I don't believe an algorithm has a soul.
It does not receive inspiration in the sense that humans have talked about inspiration for thousands of years—the muse, intuition, revelation, longing, prayer, imagination, memory, emotion, that strange flash of knowing that sometimes seems to arrive from somewhere beyond our conscious thoughts.
Madeleine L'Engle wrote beautifully about that mysterious state of making in Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art:
“An artist at work is in a condition of complete and total faith.” — Madeleine L’Engle
I think we've been asking the wrong question about machine-generated art. We keep asking whether technology can produce something that looks like art, while I am becoming more interested in a different question: why have human beings always needed to make art in the first place?
We Don't Create From Nothing Either
Human artists do not create out of absolutely nothing either. Christian theology reserves creatio ex nihilo—creation from nothing—for God. We work with what is already here: pigment and light, sound and language, memory and experience. Even imagination grows out of what we have seen, felt and carried with us.
Genesis makes an extraordinary claim about human beings: we are made in the image of a Creator. That has always fascinated me.
God creates, and then makes creatures with this persistent urge to make. Across time and culture, we have painted cave walls, carved stone and told stories around fires. We also keep adding beauty to ordinary things that would function perfectly well without it. Give a child a crayon and sooner or later something is getting drawn on—quite possibly your wall.
Humanity has been leaving evidence of imagination everywhere we go. That makes me wonder whether creativity is not an optional accessory to human life at all, but part of what tells us who we are.
What Happens to Education Now?
This technological shift raises uncomfortable questions about the way we educate people too.
Knowledge still matters. Children need a real education, and I am certainly not arguing that everyone should throw the textbooks into a bonfire and spend algebra class finger painting, although somebody's teenager just got very excited.
But education cannot end with memorization, standardized responses and producing the answer a system expects. Automated tools can retrieve, summarize and draft with unnerving speed. That makes the human part of education more important, not less: curiosity, discernment and creative problem-solving.
Organizations are already wrestling with this shift.
The Human Artistry Campaign, a coalition representing creators and creative organizations, supports the responsible use of generative technology as a tool that can assist human creativity while arguing that human-created work and lived experience remain essential to culture.
UNESCO has taken a similarly human-centered position in education. Its guidance on generative technologies emphasizes protecting human agency and developing students who can think critically, ethically and creatively alongside automated tools rather than simply surrendering the thinking process to them.
That sounds less like the death of human intelligence to me and more like an invitation to use it differently.
So What Is “Christian Art,” Anyway?
Once I started thinking about creativity as something connected to being made in the image of God, another question surfaced.
What makes art Christian? I do not think the answer is as simple as putting a cross on a canvas, requiring every Christian musician to record worship music, or expecting a Christian writer to mention Jesus every few pages.
My faith shapes the way I understand beauty, suffering, people, redemption, mystery and the natural world whether I explicitly mention God or not.
A Christian artist can photograph an abandoned building, write fantasy or paint sunflowers. A podcaster who loves the Lord can talk about trauma, motherhood or culture without turning every episode into a sermon in disguise.
When an artist creates from a life being shaped by God, that worldview inevitably finds its way into what they notice.
Perhaps Christian art sometimes looks less like putting Christian symbols onto things and more like learning to see creation with Christian eyes.
Beauty, truth and people matter. So do suffering, restoration and wonder. Even questions have a place. Sometimes the most faithful thing an artist can do is simply pay attention.
The Crooked Flowers Matter
Some machine-generated images are technically far beyond anything I could paint, but that does not make me want to quit. Strangely, it makes me value my crooked little paintings more, because the brushstroke records my hand, the photograph records where I chose to stand, and the journal page holds words I had to wrestle through myself.
Paint lands where I did not intend it, proportions go wrong, and a flower can spend ten awkward minutes looking like an injured vegetable before it becomes anything recognizable. That mess is part of making.
The mistake is evidence that somebody was here.
Human art carries fingerprints, sometimes literally. Its value does not come only from technical perfection; it comes from encounter. Somebody saw something, felt something and decided it mattered enough to try to give it form.
Practice Rounds for Eternity
Here I wander beyond what Scripture tells us explicitly, so consider this reflection rather than doctrine.
I wonder sometimes what creativity means eternally.
Ecclesiastes 3:11 says that God “has planted eternity in the human heart.”
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13:12 that someday we will know more fully than we do now.
Scripture does not hand us an itinerary for eternity with 10:00 a.m.—watercolors; 1:30 p.m.—celestial pottery.
Still, I cannot imagine that the human capacity for creativity—the imagination of creatures made in the image of an endlessly creative God—is merely a temporary feature needed to survive seventy or eighty years on Earth.
God did not create humanity because He needed workers.
The God who speaks galaxies into existence was never short-staffed.
He created people capable of relationship, discovery, love, curiosity, cultivation, craftsmanship, music, storytelling and wonder.
I wonder if every painting, photograph, song, garden, poem, meal, handmade gift and half-finished sketchbook is a kind of practice—learning to participate in beauty, to notice more closely and to become more fully alive. I do not know exactly what that means for eternity, but I love thinking about it.
The Automated World Might Be Giving Us Something Back
For years, the fear around automation has been that technology will make humanity less valuable.
I wonder whether the opposite could happen.
Machines may become incredibly good at producing predictable outputs. That may make the human things that are harder to quantify—presence, judgment and meaning—more precious, not less.
I think about the tiny irregular brushstroke somebody made while thinking about their mother, the photograph a grandmother took because she knew childhood was disappearing in front of her, or the song written at 2:00 in the morning because the feeling needed somewhere to go. That is not inefficiency. That is a life showing up in the work.
I have no interest in trying to outperform an algorithm at being an algorithm. I'd rather make something with my own two hands.
That possibility excites me far more than it frightens me. It sends me back to my brushes, my camera and the pleasure of trying something without knowing how it will turn out.
We could all use a little more permission to make a few glorious messes. You do not have to be an artist or make anything “good.” You just have to be willing to try.
Step Into Your Creative Spark
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. The Amazon links in this section are paid links.
You absolutely do not need to buy anything to participate. Use the crayons in your junk drawer, photograph something with your phone, or paint on the back of a cardboard box.
But if the blank page feels intimidating and having a few supplies would help you begin, these are the kinds of things I enjoy using or recommend for beginners:
Pre-sketched canvases: Great if staring at a completely blank canvas makes your brain immediately forget everything it has ever known. [https://link.amazon/B07Hk459M]
Beginner acrylic painting kit: Paint, brushes and basic supplies together so you can spend less time researching equipment and more time actually making something. [https://link.amazon/B0esqqN5q]
Acrylic paint markers: One of my favorite low-pressure ways to add color, lettering and detail without dealing with quite as much brush cleanup. [https://link.amazon/B0iBk3J05]
Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art: A beautiful companion for thinking about creativity, faith and what it means to make something. [https://link.amazon/B01ZRQx9p]
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Now I Want to See What You Make
This is the part I am most excited about, because I do not want the article to end when you close the browser. Make something with what you have. Paint something, take a photograph, or make a mess with your grandchild.
Try something you are absolutely terrible at, especially if that is usually what stops you. Then send me a photograph.
You can email your creation to gritandgracepodcasttx@gmail.com.
Tell me a little about what you made and, importantly, tell me whether you give me permission to share your photo and first name.
If you give me permission, I may feature some of your creations here on the website or in future community letters.
This is not an art competition, so please do not wait until you believe your work is “good enough.” That would defeat the point.
I want the watercolor your child helped paint, the crooked flower you almost threw away, or the first thing you have painted in thirty years. I want evidence that a human being stopped consuming for a few minutes and made something instead.
Leave a comment below and tell me what you think, too.
Has this wave of automation made you more concerned about human creativity—or has it made you appreciate human creativity more?
Then go make something, because the practice rounds for eternity may have already begun.
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