THE CREATIVE LIFE- Bethany Farrel

Hi, this is Bernie Dake. Welcome to the Salvation Army's Words of Life. Welcome back to Words of Life.

I'm Bernie Dake and I'm Chris Benjamin. We are very excited to introduce to you one of our friends and someone that I've gotten to work with over the last several years. Her name is Bethany Farrell. And in our series called Crafted, she's going to talk about the creative life. And this is something that Bethany knows very well. Yeah, she, I mean, she's passionate about dance, about theater, about, I mean, painting, you name it. And so the direction our conversation went was really just embracing the creative life in general. And a really big point that we make in this episode is making sure that you know your identity in Christ first and then allow these artistic expressions to open doors to share his love and share your love with the world around you.

Amen. I know you're going to enjoy Bethany and we hope that you see the Lord in her and that you'll come back and see us next week right here on Words of Life. Bethany, welcome to Words of Life. We're so glad to have you here. Happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

We are currently in a series called Crafted and we're just sitting down with several different artists of all kinds of mediums to just find out their passion, how they use their craft, their art for worship, for expressing themselves, for even just time alone with God. And so you are a delightful person to chime in on this conversation. So we're very glad to have you here.

Thanks. I was so excited to hear that you were doing this series because there's nothing I love more than to sit and listen to artists talk about what they do and hear about their passions. But I was so nervous when you asked me to do the interview because I feel like expressing it personally and talking about this thing. That's such a huge part of my life is difficult.

A lot of people can claim something. I'm a dancer. I'm a musician. I'm a seamstress. I'm a gardener, which is something I've gotten into lately and I'm terrible at, but I really love.

But I can't claim any one of those. I don't know that I'm an expert. I don't know if I can take anything and say, oh, I'm fabulous at this.

This is what I am just built to do. But I cannot point to a single time in my life where some art form has not been important and life bringing. I think that the Lord has always used creativity in some form or another to just keep me close and to give me life in its various forms. And it's changed over and over what it is that I'm drawn to.

Sometimes it's situational. As a child, I couldn't afford dance classes. And when college came, suddenly I have these opportunities and they were really great.

Sewing. There's been different periods of my life where I have time for it and times when I don't. I mentioned that I recently have gotten into gardening, which I've never been able to do before. And you didn't always live on a small farm. No, I didn't always live on a small farm.

Now, now that I say that, I would like everybody to know you can garden in any size that you're in, but it comes with heartbreak. So yeah, I am not by any means an expert in any field, but I have deep love and appreciation for all the art forms. How God has given us creativity as a way to express ourselves, as a way to draw closer to Him, to learn more about who He is. I like to bring up that the first thing we read in the Bible is, in the beginning, God created. He created. He's a creator. And the coolest thing is we learn a little bit later that we are made in His image, which means all of us have that piece of the Creator.

Now it looks different for every person. Some of us are dancers. Some of us put paint on paper in masterful ways.

And some people can create intricate and flawless Excel spreadsheets. And I think that there is value to all of that. Everybody's got their own form of creativity, and it's just a matter of honing in and finding what that looks like for you today. There's pressure, especially when we're younger, to find this, quote, true north.

Everyone's looking for the thing they were called to do. There's an Oscar Wilde quote that I love. And he once said, if you know what you want to be, then inevitably you become it. But if you never know, you can be anything. And I've learned that it's OK to find multiple things that you're drawn to, and it doesn't make you any less of an artist in any way to say, well, I'm not an expert in all these things.

I just kind of appreciate this. Like the whole, you know, jack of all trades, master of none, that has a terrible connotation. Like I completely disagree with that. I think there's nothing wrong with that. I think it's empowering and exciting. You don't have to be a great painter that knows all the skills to take joy out of a paintbrush and colorful paint.

Put it on the canvas. Right. There's so much joy and freedom and not claiming mastery status and just allowing yourself the experience of the process. You don't have to be a master.

You don't have to know that you've been trained for this. You can just enjoy it all. As far as art's having such a beautiful ability to help us worship and connect with God and learn more about ourselves, how has art also been therapy for you? How has that worked for you to work through darker periods in your life? Oh, so I have had a couple periods of life that have been very heavy and hard. And we've all experienced these kinds of situations, right, where it's heartbreak or loss, postpartum depression, dealing with overwhelming changes.

These are things that pop up in our life and everybody handles them differently and sees them differently. But for me, I was not. When I feel like I was not in an expressive place when I was at my lowest, it kind of felt like this black hole. Everything that I pictured of who I was in my head, my ideal self would be bright and happy and colorful and cheerful and creative, right? All these words that you hear about yourself growing up, but then you hit these moments of loss and it's like it just washes down the shower drain and just leaves this emptiness. To me, those low places were filled with emptiness and a void and just darkness is kind of how I see it in my head when I look back on it. These periods of just black. The Lord reached out to me with color and with vibrancy.

So in the midst of the blackness, there was this bit of color that started to come like a beacon bringing you back. And so I learned that and I've started being purposeful about that. Putting a beautiful piece of art in my line of sight, right by the bed, whatever it takes, right? Putting a beautiful piece of art or taking a beautiful marker. Don't just pick up a pencil or a pen, but take the pretty markers to write out the scripture passage that will be affirming to you.

Maybe it's putting on a happy piece of music and dancing around in the kitchen when you're feeling better. But it's just about being purposeful about bringing that art, bringing the color, bringing the texture and the beauty into those dark places to help bring you out because that's how the Lord, to me, has used art as a therapy. He will bring the color and bring me back to life that way. And you responding in that way to hear that from him is you walking through faith and speaking about things as though they were. Yeah, that's the thing. When you're in the darkness, it doesn't mean you forget the truth.

It just gets kind of clouded out. So you have to remember God doesn't want you sitting in a pit of despair. God doesn't want, that's not what he has for you. God used a bright, colorful rainbow to promise the world that there is a future, that there is a beautiful future for you.

And I embrace that fully. No matter what it is you're working on, how do you invite the Lord into your creative space? So for me, I feel like it's actually the opposite way around in that God has made all of these creative spaces for me to step into. And if I am very purposeful about seeking him and looking to him, whether it's a writing project or music or a program that I get to speak into, the Lord has already prepared that for me. He's created the way for me. And I just get to step into it and let it flow through me and wash over me.

And it becomes so much more a piece of worship as I get to just jump into what the Lord already has for me. I could talk to you for like another hour, but I want to hit like maybe some of the other points if there's something that you really feel God put in your heart. Let's talk a little bit about getting older. Oh, yes. I turned 40 this year.

I don't want to talk about it. Well, you, I think what I appreciate about this series is that you've been very purposeful in getting people from all walks of life or all stages of life into the booth to hear from them. And I think one of the mistakes that we make is when we talk about the arts or creative arts, we tend to look to the young people and we say, okay, these are the young people programs. Let's give them creative arts. But by the time they're adults, we take those things away. And it sets this terrible idea that you age out of creativity. We are called to a creative life, not a small period of time when you're young and vibrant and can touch your toes.

Good for you, right? That's not what it's about. It's about having your heart and your eyes be open to the different ways that God can speak to us and through us. And that's not something that changes. Now the details of it can change significantly. I think that's something that I've struggled with a little bit, being quite vulnerable with you here as I've grown from being a teenager and a young adult into being a mother. And I'm still a young adult.

I refuse to claim otherwise, but I'm not, you know, I'm in my late thirties and it changes things. Your body becomes shared space. Your energy gets divided immeasurably.

And though there's utter joy in the gift of a child, there's no denying that there's a dramatic metamorphosis that happens to a woman. Things don't fit the same way and they don't wind up the same way and it doesn't feel right and things are hurting like they never used to. And it just felt unfamiliar, like I couldn't find my way back. I remember memorizing scripts was, it used to be so easy.

I could do it in a snap and suddenly my brain broke and it stopped working. That's what happens. There's shifts and there's massive things that happen as you grow. Your priorities change. Your passions can change too. And that's okay.

It's okay. You don't have to do the same thing your whole life for it to be valid. You can enjoy the experience while it's there. It doesn't mean it's not going to circle back around and you get to experience that again. We feel the loss when it happens, but I think that learning to have grace with ourselves and with our bodies and with our situations helps us to embrace the full life of creativity, not the periods of creativity or the small experiences that we have, but seeing the full culture, it helps me appreciate what it means to be human, what it means to be a woman, and more importantly, to be a follower of Jesus in every season. Bethany, thank you so much for joining us.

Certainly this series we're going to revisit again probably next year. I'm so glad to hear that. And it was just an honor to get to sit down and chat with you. Thank you.

Pleasure's mine. Thanks, Chris. God bless you. The Salvation Army's mission, Doing the Most Good, means helping people with material and spiritual needs. You become a part of this mission every time you give to the Salvation Army. Visit salvationarmyusa.org to offer your support, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us at radio at uss.salvationarmy.org. Call 1-800-229-9965 or write us at P.O.

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