God Creates Extravagantly
I have a fantasy novel manuscript sitting on my hard drive that taught me something embarrassing about myself.
I wrote the first draft lean. Intentionally lean — I was proud of it, actually. No overwrought description, no lingering in scenes longer than necessary, no indulgence. Very disciplined. Very self-controlled. I got through the story quickly, efficiently. Not taking up too much of anyone’s time.
And then five separate people read it and told me, essentially, the same thing: "I really wanted to visualize this world... but I couldn't."
Five. Not one. Not two. Five friends, independently, wanted more. My restraint, it turned out, was not the gift to others that I thought it was.
After the fifth person, I rewrote the book. It was nearly a hundred pages longer. And it was so much better that it was almost annoying — because it turned out that what I had been calling efficiency was actually a kind of stinginess. I wasn't being disciplined; I was being withholding. I was so afraid of going on and on that I had forgotten that people want to be lost in a world. They want to be given enough to inhabit.
It’s extra embarrassing because the author that made me want to write as a kid was Tolkien — the man who made languages and lands and complex histories for people to lose themselves in. I knew firsthand what made fantasy fantastic!
Extravagance, it turns out, is not self-indulgence. It's generosity.
And it got me thinking: art is defined, in large part, by the fact that it’s unnecessary. The adornment, the ornamentation, the creativity is about going above and beyond function and considering the form. It’s not just telling what happened, but crafting it into a story; it’s not just stating a point, but embodying it on a stage.
We call God “Creator,” a lot, and I think that is right and good and Biblical. But isn’t He also an Artist? Creators make useful things; Artists go beyond that to make beautiful things.
In other words, God did not write a sparse first draft.
The seas are not only deep enough to sustain life — they are unfathomably deep, filled with bioluminescent creatures no human eye will ever see, in trenches we have barely begun to explore. The land doesn't only produce enough variety to keep ecosystems functioning — it produces beetles in the hundreds of thousands of species, butterflies with wing patterns that exist in places no one is watching, flowers that bloom and die without an audience. The heavens don't just provide light for navigation and seasons — they expand outward into galaxies upon galaxies, distances so vast they have no practical relevance to any human life that has ever been lived.
In fact, in my opinion, the stars are God’s biggest artistic flex… And we literally thought they were ceiling lamps!
For most of human history, we thought the sky was like a big blue dome over the earth. The sun and moon and stars were the lighting installed to help us get around and know seasons and days and years–because functionally, that's all we needed!
Imagine spending billions of years creating galaxies so detailed that humanity mistakes them for decorative ceiling lights.
And even now that we do know more, mostly what we know is how much we will never know! The Hubble Space telescope continually shocks us with how many billions more galaxies exist in every direction than we ever thought possible!
Which raises a genuinely strange question: why? Why make stars we will never name? Why embed that level of detail in places no one will ever observe?
Unless the goal was never just function.
God creates the way Tolkien wrote fantasy (times a gazillion) — not because every detail will be seen and catalogued, but because that's what it means to actually make a world. You build it fully. You give it everything. You make for the delight of making, and you make beyond what even the most dedicated fan could exhaust discovering.
In fact, creation is so abundantly generous to its audience, but it also resists justifying itself with an audience. Because God was apparently perfectly content to wait until the twentieth century for us to begin to realize what He'd done in the skies.
Which made me realize: God’s less like me in my first draft of my fantasy novel and more like me when I get carried away making a totally unnecessary board game.
So last month — during one of the more personally difficult months I've had in a while — I made a board game. From scratch. For a birthday party.
It started reasonably enough. I'd finally read a very popular dystopian book series, got excited about watching the films with friends, and thought: why not make it a full occasion? So I started designing rules. Then I started working on branding — colors, fonts, a visual vocabulary. Then I was doing digital art for terrain tiles and character cards and weapon illustrations. Then I was picking out little wooden leaves as resource tokens and red beads that looked like blood drops for health points, because of course I was.
What I ended up with was a professional-quality game. For a birthday party. That no one had asked me to make.
My friends were stunned. And then they suggested I try to publish and distribute it, which is a whole other conversation. But here's what struck me: I hadn't set out to make something significant. I'd gotten carried away out of delight — out of wanting to create something magical for the people I love, wanting their experience to be rich and tactile and visually beautiful and fun. I wanted them to enjoy the sounds of the world and the weight of the tokens in their hands and the pleasure of the cards. I was thinking about their whole experience, not just the game mechanics.
And I made it during a month of intense personal stress and family hardship.
That surprised me most of all. The active joy of extravagant making was powerful enough not just to distract from the pain, but to genuinely push back against it. There is something about getting gloriously carried away in creation that has its own kind of resilience in it.
I think this is the reason Christ’s ministry starts making wine at the wedding at Cana… which, I gotta admit, I find almost offensive.
I know that’s not a great reaction to have to the Messiah’s first chosen miracle, but hear me out! If you had asked me to list the priorities of Jesus's ministry, I'd have a lot to say. Healing the sick. Serving the poor. Confronting religious hypocrisy. Helping people understand the Kingdom of God. These are weighty, urgent, defensible things. They are the kinds of things you put in a grant application.
But the first sign? The inaugural miracle? Helping people drink more wine at a party.
As someone running the nonprofit budget of our ministry — an organization that is constantly questioned about whether our budget is being optimized, whether our programming is efficient enough, whether we are doing enough with what we have — the wedding at Cana is genuinely difficult to read. If I submitted a budget line item for "wine, abundant, high quality, for a several-day party thrown by some friends," I think I know how that would go.
And Jesus does not just provide wine. He provides a staggering amount of wine. Good wine. Wine that surprises the host. Wine that feels almost excessive for the occasion.
Why on earth would that be His first priority?
But I think this is intentional. I think it's meant to be uncomfortable. Because it is the first glimpse we are given of what divine presence looks like when it enters a situation — and it does not look like careful stewardship of limited resources. It looks like abundance that expands the capacity of the moment.
Which tells us something important: extravagance is not waste in Scripture. It is revelation. It tells us who God is. Not only that He is powerful, but that He is generous. Not only that He can provide, but that He delights in providing more than was asked for.
And as much as we like to pretend we are efficiency machines, humans don’t survive on powdered multi-vitamins; we fought wars for spices. God could have invented nutritious grey mush; instead He made mangoes.
Did you know that the Tree of Life is described as having 12 types of fruit! 12 types! Talk about unnecessary, lavish, delicious, artistic design. That’s what sets Life apart from mere Knowledge, the tree it is contrasted with. What does it mean to choose 12 fruits where 1 good-looking fruit would suffice?
I think that's what we're trying to recover in our creative lives — not just permission to make things that don't have immediate utility, but permission to get carried away. To make things with more in them than strictly required. To think about the full experience of the person who will receive your work: what do you want them to feel? What do you want them to hear, to smell, to touch, to inhabit?
If you are a writer, what would it mean to let yourself build the world a little more fully than feels safe? If you are a musician, what would it mean to think about the visual experience of your performance, or the physical space your music will fill? If you are a visual artist, what would it mean to think about sound, or scent, or the way light moves through a room? What would it mean to try something you've never tried before, purely because it might be more generous to the person taking in your work?
Creating extravagantly is hospitality. It is the difference between giving someone directions to your house and actually setting the table for them.
God made a universe with more in it than we will ever fully see. Jesus made more wine than the party needed. And somewhere in that pattern is an invitation: make things that are more than enough. Build worlds people can actually get lost in. Get carried away with generosity.
And just to name it: this kind of generosity extends to yourself, too. We're so trained to justify our work by its audience — the metrics, the engagement, the imagined reviewer — that we can make abundantly for others and still withhold from ourselves. But God made beauty that had no audience except Himself and made it anyway.
Make the things that delight you. Sneak in what only you will notice. Leave more than anyone asked for.
The stars God made that no one has named yet are not a mistake.
They are an example.
