Countdown to Tübingen

yes, you heard right: *real* americans!

“Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten,” writes Hugh MacLeod. Feh.

When I was a child, I was not just creative – I was the five year-old da Vinci of my time. I drew, I painted, I glued macaroni in thought-provoking formations to contruction paper before having a qualified adult spray-paint the entire thing gold. My pipe cleaner sculptures put the shallow, pedantic pipe cleaner sculptures of my classmates to shame. I was the Matisse of finger paint. I was the Rembrandt of the Number 2 pencil with extra-thick grip for persons with small hands.

I’m not saying other children weren’t born creative – I’m just saying that I was imbued with the kind of creativity that put all the other children with similar crayon boxes to shame. The kind of creativity that got awards for the comic strips in the high school newspaper. The kind of creativity that survived four and a half years of cybernetic hybernation while I was at Georgia Tech.

And now, that incredible, undying, and unyielding creativity that started with a box of crayons is at work for you in the field.

Only now instead of crayons, I use Photoshop. Instead of producing macaroni art, I produce vector-based Web 2.0 graphics. And instead of home-made, VHS-taped sock puppet shows with stuffed animal cameos, I now put out network-quality multimedia of our time and events at Unterwegs.

In 1989, as a smaller, cuter version of me sat in my kindergarten classroom, painting a blue horse in front of a red house with a green rocket ship flying overhead, I had no clue that in twenty years I would be living in Germany working as a missionary, using those same skills to help share a life-changing Christian experience with university students. But here we are. That’s a creative effort worth supporting.