To Infinity and Beyond!

I’ve never been a fan of the infinite monkey theorem, you know the one, where the story goes, if you left a bunch of monkeys alone with some typewriters and paper for an unlimited amount of time, eventually they would write the Complete Works of Shakespeare. I tend to be more of the school of thought that says, no, I think you would just end up with a lot of monkey poo and screwed up paper, not to mention the logistical nightmare that would go into feeding and resupplying the monkeys. But of course, such thought experiments are not meant to be bogged down by common sense. 

The point for me is that words have infinite potential. Almost every day, sometimes several times, I either write or speak a sentence that has never been written or uttered before (at least by me).Today that might be, “The halo is a hazelnut,” (don’t ask) and it strikes me that, much like musical notes have infinite potential to create new things, so do words. We are, in a sense, composers. And so is God. In fact I think he gets pretty excited about it.

“Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” Isaiah 43: 19 (partial, ESV)

I think it is pretty obvious that the Creator loves variety. There are, for instance, around 75,000 species of wasp.

Doing things over and over again in new and surprising ways is one of the things we do that mirrors God, that makes us co-creators with him, and for me, what makes the arts so thrilling. We are making new things! And we are all doing it our own way, in our own time, with our own words and our unique lives and imaginations. Unlike our monkey friends, left to bang away randomly at our typewriters, we have the gift of language. 

Some of us will write dazzling plays, like Shakespeare did. Some will write poems that are never critically acclaimed, but which are an enormous blessing to those in difficult places. Some of us will bring joy to small children with our rhyming stories. We might make people think, learn, cry, laugh, maybe even come to a faith in the goodness of a God they had never considered before. We might create characters that endear themselves to people’s hearts for generations to come.

Whatever it is we write, whatever genre or method or language we use, we are doing something wonderful that God created us to do, and if we are doing it with him, we will find it all the more rewarding, and I believe, so will our readers.

[picture from Wikipedia – listed copyright free – and yes, I know this is a chimpanzee, which is an ape, not a monkey (ook!). But we’re on a budget here.]

Keren Dibbens-Wyatt is a disabled writer and artist with a passion for poetry, mysticism, story and colour. Her writing features regularly on spiritual blogs and in literary journals. Her full-length publications include Garden of God’s Heart and Whale Song: Choosing Life with Jonah. She lives in South East England and is mainly housebound by her illness.