People ask this as if it has to be one or the other.
Either creativity is something you were given or it's something you were called to do. Like it has to be either a natural aptitude, a talent distributed at birth like eye color or height or a vocation with weight and purpose and intentional direction. The debate implies a choice, as if the answer changes what you do with it.
I think it's both, and I think them working in tandem makes a huge difference.
A gift without a calling can stay perpetually potential. Admired, occasionally exercised, but never fully inhabited. You have the ability but not the orientation, the talent but not the direction. The gift sits in you like an instrument no one plays, capable of music that never gets made.
A calling without a gift is its own kind of frustration. The deep sense of purpose unmatched by the capacity to execute it, the vision outrunning the ability to bring it into being.
When both are present, thought, and when the gift and the calling align, the possibilities become nearly endless. The creativity stops being just a thing you do and starts being a thing you are. It becomes the lens through which you see everything else, the mode through which you process experience and make meaning and contribute something to the world that only you, with your particular combination of wiring and history and perspective, could have made.
But the most important part? It's something you shouldn't take for granted. Something you should steward well.
Whether it arrived as gift, calling, or both, it showed up in you for a reason. The question is what you'll do with it.
Do you think of your creativity as a gift, a calling, or something else entirely? I'd love to hear how you understand it in the comments.
