Last week, I came home from work after a crazy, completely exhausting day. My twin girls, Hope & Grace, were walking around the house with a guitar, writing songs. According to Hope, Grace writes kiddie songs, but she writes big kid’s songs. So even though my desire arriving home was to sit on the couch and decompress, I knew I’d spend this night writing songs with my twins.
Now, these songs will never make a record, but they were platinum hits at home and for a few minutes that night we got to share a little creative wonder. For those few minutes, I was living a dream that I want to share today – a dream I have for my kids to remain in the creative innocence that youth provides. I want them to be engulfed by imagination and wonder for as long as possible. I want this so much that sometimes I wish they could pull me into their world for a little while.
Have you ever thought what it must be like to be a child in Syria right now? There’s just no space for creative innocence or imagination.
You can’t play. You can’t explore. You can’t follow your imagination on adventures that will stretch and challenge your creativity to new heights.
Instead, kids in Syria wake up every day and wonder if it might be their last. They’re not dreaming and imagining what life could be, what possibilities exist, what creativity looks like for them. They’re worried about survival … and that’s sad.
Right now, there are parts of Syria where children can’t even go back to school. Their lives have been brutally interrupted. They have nothing, which may be the best place for creativity to live, but sadly, that place may include the loss of hope.
There’s nothing like getting the chance to embrace your childhood. I know I want my kids to stay young and free for as long as they possibly can. I want them to dream, I want them to explore, I want them to imagine things that are so ridiculous and so much fun. The last thing I want my kids to worry about is if they’re going to make it to lunch without seeing someone killed, or worse, dying themselves.
Kids deserve more. They deserve innocence and they deserve wonder. It gets so easy to take creativity and the freedom to be creative for granted. If I’m honest, I complain if my “process” gets interrupted, let alone my life. So today, I’m taking a minute, stopping, and praying that kids in Syria get the chance to be creative today.
I’m also partnering with a campaign called #Dreamshare – a partnership with World Vision to return creativity to kids who have lost everything. World Vision is working with refugee kids to help them get back into school, get caught up, and regain some of the normality that will provide them the space to be the creative monsters God created them to be.
#Dreamshare has created a microsite where you can visit to share your own dreams, or you can post on social media using #dreamshare. This campaign is dreaming to inspire two million uses of the hashtag.
Today, I dream for kids to have the ability to stay creative, especially kids in Syria. What dream will you share?
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