Jeremy Duncan: Creativity has to become more than just a pastime or a label we allow the creative class to own. I think we need to get creative, all of us, about how we engage the world around us. Because if not, we need to know that there are forces like our bricks and our smartphones that will shape our story for us. We have arrived at 2026. So let's pray, and then we'll jump into this new series together.
God of new beginnings, who is always ahead, inviting us forward, encouraging us to begin and then begin again. Would you be present in the start of this new year with us as we imagine ourselves in new moments and situations, as we learn to love the best about what you have created in us and for us, As we survey a new year laid out in front of us, full of possibility and danger and triumph and failure. Might we become captured all over again by what you see in us, goodness and kindness and strength and resolve to change. Then would you fill our lungs with the fresh breath of spirit. Allow us to see with new eyes the possibilities that lie ahead and bring us in joy as real as grace to celebrate your holy presence with us in this new year.
In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Alright. How to be more creative. That's our new series.
We thought that a good way to start this new year might be a time to talk about our creativity. However, might notice here, we have not titled this series how to be creative. It's because I am firmly convinced that there is no such thing as an uncreative human being. We are all of us made in the image of God, crafted in the image of the one we call creator. And so, when we talk about creativity, we're not talking about some elusive esoteric genius confined to the special among us.
We are talking about the very thing we were created to be. In fact, if you go back to the very beginning, the opening world of Genesis, you find a poem about the creativity of God who creates an incredibly creative world. Very literally, Genesis starts with a God who makes seeds who make more seeds, and fish who make more fish, birds who make birds, and trees who make trees, and human beings who not only make more human beings, but also name and order, classify, and importantly, explore all of this whole long creative chain. So this is not intended to be a series for content creators. You can put your selfie sticks away.
Even more importantly, though, this is not intended as a conversation for writers and painters and musicians or graphic designers or whatever occupation we have arbitrarily assigned the title creative. This is intended to be a conversation for all the ways that we can bring our full selves to bear in our world, in our spirituality, and importantly, in our relationships. And so we'll start the year by talking about how to be more creative in our lives. Today, we're gonna talk about how we do that with our technology. So, we'll cover smartphones, bricks and bable, technology in consequence, and finally, a little frivolous creativity.
But first, a bit of a detour here. This week, I posted on social media, of all places, about a parenting slash Christmas gift giving experiment our family embarked on. Just before Christmas, I told you about my son's Christmas wish for cash, how excited he is that now in grade seven, he can leave the school campus at lunch to go get a slice of pizza around the corner. And even though cash to fuel his pizza fund was not on the cards for him this Christmas, I do understand the significance of this burgeoning independence that he's experiencing. He's 12 years old now.
He takes the city bus home from school every day. He babysits his sister from time to time. By the way, big bonus here when your eldest reaches this stage, Rachel and I actually went out for dinner a couple weeks ago. Just the two of us. It was incredible.
My son is doing all of these things and apparently leaving lunch at school for pizza. And thus far, we have, with no intention of changing course here, not added another cell phone to our home. We also probably, like a lot of you, don't have a landline in the house either. And so we've been wondering about how to keep him connected. Now thankfully, there are lots of good options out there, flip phones with no internet access for example, but what we went with was a smartwatch.
And we liked this option because one, really the most important thing, we were hoping that by strapping it to him physically, there was a little less chance he would lose it. But that watch also has cellular access, so he can text mom and dad. He can call emergency services all without apps and social media. Now as a bonus, also happens to have GPS, so we can track him when he wanders over to a friend's house undeclared. But I posted about this, again, ironically enough on social media.
Got lots of parents chiming in here from this community with similar concerns and offering their creative solutions. One of the main reasons, though, we even found ourselves wondering about how to navigate connecting a 12 year old to the Internet in 2026 was all of this research that's come out in the last few years about the negative impacts of technology on our kids. One of the highest profile compilations of that research is Jonathan Haidt's Anxious Generation. Well worth a read for any parents of young kids in the room, by the way. But in it, he argues, the prevalence of screens and smartphones and social media in our kids' lives has had demonstrably negative effects.
Tite argues four main impacts. First, social deprivation, less face to face interaction and play between kids. Second, sleep disruption, digital screens interfering with sleep patterns, attention fragmentation, rapid switching between apps and games and threads and streams erodes our focus. And finally, he identifies addictive use patterns, Specifically, social media platforms that have been intentionally engineered to encourage prolonged engagement within the app, even as they train us to keep scrolling and swiping and flicking, which fragments our focus even more. Now is HEIGHTS analysis perfect?
Well, I think there's some important questions here about correlation and causation. It is true though, we can see similar declines in mental health data across almost all industrialized nations starting right around 2010 as smartphones became ubiquitous. I do think it's important that we acknowledge though that the emergence of a technology like smartphones has impacted not only the way our kids interact with the world, but, let's be honest here, the way we parent them as well. For the record, on camera right now, I am as guilty of this as anyone. I'm trying to do better, but I know that when I talk to my kids with one eye on my smartphone, that is having at least as much effect as any technology I could ever put in their hands.
Actually, over the break, I was home watching a movie with my kids, sitting on the couch with my five year old daughter when she turned to me and said, dad, we're already watching a movie. You don't need two screens, gesturing to the iPhone in my hand. In my defense, I have seen k pop demon hunters enough times to know the whole thing by heart, so there's that. Still, she's right. So, yes, we've made the call not to get our son a smartphone yet.
We're keeping social media at bay at least for a few more years. The parents in the room, if all we do is keep smartphones out of the hands of our kids and we let them stay glued to ours, I'm not sure that's the victory we think it is. Because whether you're a parent or not, the point is we have an incredible responsibility to ensure that we are using technology creatively rather than allowing technology to use us. Here's the thing. Technology is incredible.
One of my favorite YouTubers, MKBHD, Marquise Brownlee, put out a video last week demonstrating that if silicon transistors today were the size they were in the nineteen seventies, a single iPhone would be the size of the state of New Jersey. There are more than 19,000,000,003 nanometer transistors in a single iPhone chip. That's what you've got in your pocket right now. Compute power that was literally science fiction a generation ago. But, along with all that power has come this profound ability to isolate us from each other, to disrupt our natural patterns, and to turn us slowly into the product that is being consumed.
The irony is that this is not a particularly new problem. And so I wanna show you something you probably never considered in relation to your smartphone, but in some ways it is the same story found all the way back in the primeval history of Genesis. And it's an etiology. Now an etiology is just the name that we give to a story that was written to offer a cause or an origin for something that we observe around the world about us. In this case, it's an origin story for the diversity of human language.
But this is also a story about how technology can have unintended consequences. So this is Genesis 11. Now, the whole world had one language and a common speech. And as people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and they settled there. And they said to each other, come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly.
So, they used brick instead of stone and tar for mortar. Then they said, come, let us build ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens so that we can make a name for ourselves. Otherwise, we might be scattered over the face of the earth. But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the people were building. Now, I talked about this one before, but like this is peak bronze age humor right here.
We're gonna build a tower. It's gonna reach to God. And God is like, oh, isn't that cute? They think they can get up here. I guess I'll go down and see what they're up to.
Now, today. We don't believe that God lives in the sky. We've got things like telescopes and hot air balloons. But, let's be honest here. It did at least set up some good punch lines.
Still, I'm not sure you've ever thought about this, but this is a story about technology. First, the technology of language, although that's a story for another day. Maybe less conspicuous though, this is about the technology of bricks. See, this is actually the first mention of bricks anywhere in the Bible. And bricks are probably not a technology we think a lot about, but bricks made a lot of things possible for us.
Before bricks, things had to be made out of either wood and cloth and skin, temporary abodes for traveling souls. Perhaps there was stone available, but stone meant working with found objects. Now, of course you can quarry stone, carve it, and crack it, and ancient cultures did incredible things with stone, and no it wasn't aliens. But, stone was largely used in the West, in Egypt, Mesopotamia where this story is set, that was a culture built in brick. And, bricks enabled an entirely new era of human construction.
We could now build the materials for the objects we imagined. In essence, we entered the era of manufacturing. Bricks were simply better, faster, simpler, cheaper, lighter. They were, I think without exaggeration here, beyond a smartphone leap in human technology. In fact, this story here is the culmination of a very long story of technological advance that's buried in the opening of Genesis.
Start with Adam and Eve, and what are they told to do? Gather whatever food they can find from every tree in the garden except just one. That's essentially a hunter gatherer culture with the temptation to cause ecological collapse by taking more than you need. They have sons. And we meet Abel who raises flocks.
He's learned to domesticate animals. He's a nomadic pastoralist, and he has a brother Cain who grows crops. Our first agricultural foray. The first time land is seen as an asset to be controlled and owned. By the way, when Cain and Abel have their conflict, we're actually told where it happens.
It's in Cain's field. I wonder if at least part of the story is about the fact that Abel has accidentally or otherwise allowed his animals to trespass on what Cain sees as his land. Still, when Cain kills his brother and then is banished, we're told that he goes on to found a city. And there he has a great great great great grandson named Jubal who invents musical instruments, and another named Tubal Cain who invents metallurgy and tools. Think weapons.
In fact, their father, a man named Lamech, once sung a song and said, if my great grandfather Cain is avenged seven times, I will be avenged 77. So we're advancing. We're becoming more sophisticated. We're domesticating animals and owning land. We're building cities and crafting weapons.
We're imagining warfare with more reach and more devastation than had previously been thought possible. And now, we reach Babel where we invent bricks. And so we recome. Let us make. Let us burn.
Let us build. Let us create a name for ourselves. Those are the verbs in the opening of Genesis 11. This innovation, this expansion of our creative horizon, this technological intoxication, these bricks themselves are in fact a metaphor for the hubris that Babel is about. Bricks represent uniformity and the loss of individual creativity.
They are mass manufactured, stamped, and stacked with ruthless efficiency just like those leaders who think that one language has to be better than the diverse creativity of human cultures. They represent the centralization of power. Verse three says, then they said, come, let us build ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens. Quick question here. Who do you imagine is the they in that sentence?
Do you imagine it's the ones making the bricks? The ones stacking the bricks, firing them, the ones with their hands sticky with bitumen as they place them. If I had to wager, I'd guess that they are those who imagine themselves sitting at the top of those towers when they're done. Not the ones laying the foundations. Cities need hierarchies after all.
Finally, these bricks represent our tendency towards self aggrandizement. We've created this technology. We can do things beyond what nature can offer us. Now we can make things God can't even dream of. So let's use that technology.
To care for the least? No. To make things easier for those that might be struggling? No. Let's build a monument to ourselves, one that almost assuredly requires the sacrifice of at least a few on the bottom.
By the way, if you think I'm stretching this all too far? Just pull up a bible and search for the next reference to bricks anywhere in the story. Next time this word shows up, here's a hint. It's in the very next book. It's in Exodus where we find the Hebrews now enslaved in Egypt, and they are doing what?
They are making bricks for Pharaoh. You know what's interesting? Egypt is a civilization built on stone architecture. They got pyramids standing to this day, built long before Mesopotamian culture arose, and yet they don't have the Hebrews out gathering stones and cracking rocks. They've been subsumed by the technology of Mesopotamia.
They got the Hebrews baking bricks on their back breaking quotas. Now, is all of this just an anti brick tirade? Jeremy hates bricks. Here he goes again. Now, I love bricks.
More bricks for everyone as far as I'm concerned. What I'm trying to point out is that the story we face today with a computer that would have been the size of New Jersey just a few decades ago now stuffed in our pocket and deciding what kinds of screens to give our kids, it's not all that dissimilar to what humans have been facing as soon as we started to create. Because creativity often gives way to efficiency, and the pursuit of efficiency leads to uniformity, which breeds the centralization of power, which leads to the self aggrandizement of a few, which isolates us from each other, which slowly turns human beings. Made in the wonderful image of a creative God, now cogs in a machine designed to churn out more of what we already have. The question then is how do we escape that racket?
How do we free ourselves from the tyranny of efficiency and return to at least some measure of the frivolous creativity we were always meant to live from? And this is where I think creativity has to become more than just a pastime or a label we allow the creative class to own. I think we need to get creative, all of us, about how we engage the world around us because if not, we need to know that there are forces like our bricks and our smartphones that will shape our story for us. So, we go. My first set of tips on how to be more creative this year.
I'll tell you what. Usually not much of a fan of alliteration. Don't find it very creative. But, this week, it just kinda worked, so bear with me here. Wanna talk about being curious and critical and close.
First, let's talk about curiosity. One of the problems that Jonathan Haidt points out in the anxious generation is that the way that screens are employed, in particular, the way that social platforms are engineered, has led to massive attention fragmentation. In particular, we've been trained to focus on what grabs our attention immediately. It's the efficiency of bricks on steroids. The problem is in my forty seven years and fifty some odd weeks of experience, the most important relationships, your next best friend, the person you will marry, the professor who will teach you the most about the thing you never wanted to learn about, even the Jesus who will offer to change your life, none of these will immediately grab your attention.
At least not the way that TikTok will. Here's the truth. Real people, honestly, not that exciting. And that's okay. Because we are living with wildly unrealistic expectations of each other.
We're imagining that the most fascinating things about someone will be sitting there on the surface of their lives in full view for all to see. That's not where the best things are supposed to be. The most fascinating things about us should be buried under a mountain of conversations born of an intentional curiosity. Because efficiency is not the goal in relationship. So one, if you're on social media, that's great.
I am. Fair play. Just make sure you leave a little bit of mystery. Save the best parts of your story for someone to discover in person. Not everything needs to be online.
And two, you and I, we then need to work to intentionally build our curiosity. We need to practice asking questions. We need to exercise waiting for answers. We need to train ourselves to trust that if we work for it, we will uncover relationships we could not have imagined for ourselves. Which, by the way, goes for absolutely everything around you.
There's so much to be curious about in this world. Romans one twenty says, for since the creation of the world's, world, God's invisible qualities, eternal power, and divine nature, all have been clearly seen being understood from what has been made. God is seen in everything that's been made, both the rocks from God and the bricks from your neighbors. The divine is all around us just waiting for us to cultivate the curiosity to look. Second, let's talk about being critical.
Because as I've said, I'm I'm not anti brick. I'm not anti smartphone. I am certainly not anti technology. I find all of it quite fascinating. What I am fond of though is a hermeneutic of suspicion.
And one of the easiest ways to think about what that phrase means is to simply ask, what is not being said here? When a company on the Internet wants to give you something for free, how is that being paid for? What is the product that's actually being sold here, and is it you? That's a really important question to ask. Now, it might be a bargain worth making.
That's fine. You should still ask the question. Because if we can't develop a critical eye for technology, what we'll find is that just like the ancient residents of Babylon, we are no longer the ones directing our own story. There's this passage in the Psalms, Psalm 20 specifically. It's David writing, and he's reflecting on some of the battles that he's engaged as a king and a warrior.
But the language that he uses here, I think it's possible there's an element of callback to that exodus from Egypt and the breakaway from the slavery of bricks. He writes, some trust in chariots, but I will trust in the name of the Lord. When I read that for me, what it brings up is that image of Pharaoh's chariot charging into the Red Sea, swallowed up by the Hebrew trust in their God. What did Pharaoh put his trust in? The malformed end of technological pursuit.
Efficiency that leads to power, leads to militarization, that leads to violence. And here, David is perhaps desperately trying to remain suspicious of that kind of power, power that he holds. He wants to save himself from putting his trust in the wrong places. A warrior that is suspicious of power, I like that. Because finally, I think we could talk about closeness.
And what I mean here is the intentional refusal to insulate ourselves from our weakness. Any technology, take our houses for example, can make us think we are a lot more impervious than we are. It's a pretty nice week this week, but Calgary winters are a harsh reminder of our frailty. Now, my kids love to play outside even when it's cold. Very proud of them for that.
However, they also like it when I watch them play outside and not from the window, but close enough that they can yell, watch this. I'll tell you what, it's a lot colder when you're watching than it is when you're playing. By the way, probably also my cue to get in there and start playing, which might also help with my creativity. So touche, children. What I'm saying is, the bricks that build our houses and the fintech that houses our retirement savings, all of this can make us think that we are a lot more self sufficient than we really are.
In fact, our technology can make us think that we, like Babel, don't need God at all. And I think that kind of hubris is the antithesis of creativity. Think about it this way. Once you have more money than you can possibly spend, and still the only thing you can think to do with your day is to get more, I think that's because you've run out of ideas. Now bear with me.
I'm not talking about wealth on its own. I know a lot of very successful people who are doing incredible things, but in my experience, they are driven by the fascination of creation, not the creative vacuum of accumulation. And one of the ways that we regain our creativity for ourselves, one of the ways that we recapture our sovereignty from our wealth and our technology, is to draw ourselves back for the source, all that is good, to remind ourselves on the regular that everything we have is gift. Jesus says, pray this way. Lord, give us this day our daily bread.
Lord, teach me to pray for just enough. God, help me to understand that's all I ever had to begin with anyway. Because if we can know ourselves the way that God knows us, beloved and cared for, not as our technological artifices would have us imagine ourselves independent and self sufficient. Well, not only will we be more honest with ourselves and the world, we might also find ourselves less captured by the narratives that tells us what to make, what to gather, what to stack, what to accumulate. And then we might be more free to imagine what we want to create in the world.
So if we wanna be more creative this year, we can start by being more curious about the world around us than the people near us, more critical of the narratives that drive us to build and stack and accumulate as close as possible to the source from which all creativity flows. Because maybe then we can use our bricks and our smartphones in ways that build the world for our neighbors rather than just towers that separate us from each other. What the world needs is a little more creativity from all of us, pointed in the direction of a world that is better for everyone. Let's pray. God, we are so grateful for all of these gifts, everything that we have, everything that has been gifted to us, the world around us that we can use and shape and create new things from.
The ways that we can apply your creativity given to us to manage the world in new ways. But God, we ask that this year, that creativity will not be driven by narratives beyond our control, narratives that just tell us to do more and more of the same, but instead of real creativity. To dream new things for ourselves. To dream new possibilities for our neighbors. To put our back and our efforts and our imagination into new things that will create new opportunities for your grace and your peace to slowly flood out through the world.
Holy Spirit, be near us, be in us, be creative through us. And in that, might we participate in the story that you are telling this year ahead. In the strong name of the risen Christ, pray. Amen. Hey Jeremy here and thanks for listening to our podcast.
If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at Commons, you can head to our website commons.church for more information. You can find us on all of the socials commonschurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel where we are posting content regularly for the community. You can also join our Discord server. Head to commons.churchdiscord for the invite, and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus.
We would love to hear from you. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.