🧁 Creativity Doesn't Have to Make Sense🧁
Mar 10, 2026
This is another in my series of Picture Books for the Grown-up Soul. We’re looking beneath the surface of picture books and seeing how they speak to us.
Mud Pie Annie —God’s Recipe for Doing Your Best by Sue Buchanan and Dana Shafer is about Annie, a little girl who loves to cook…with mud. She gathers ingredients from her backyard and makes the most elaborate dishes you can imagine: eclairs, casseroles, Baklava, Italian Almondine, custard, and something called Double Mud Surprise Supreme. She wears a paper bag for a chef’s hat, and gives all her attention to what’s she’s making.
She offers her creations to the neighbors, but they are full. 😝Her parents are the only ones brave enough to try a bite, but they immediately regret it. 🤢 They rinse out their mouths and realize that Annie has made a huge mess and needs a bath. As she’s in that bathtub, her parents are hoping this phase will pass and that once she’s clean, she’ll forget about her mud-pie-making career.
Annie doesn’t forget. In fact, she remembers a Sunday School verse: Work at everything with all your heart. She hums it and realizes that God isn’t concerned with the mud between her toes, he sees her heart.
So she keeps creating,
Even in the bathtub.
Where she create with bubbles instead of mud.
Annie doesn’t worry if she has the right tools. She uses what’s available. She doesn’t stop because people aren’t “eating” what she’s making. She doesn’t look to their reaction to decide whether she should continue.
She gives herself fully to the act of creating because something about it matters to her.
Creativity affects us differently. What feels creative to me might not feel creative to you. That’s part of how we are made.
Annie’s creativity didn’t stop with the bath, even though her parents hoped it might. Many of us learned that creativity could be messy, impractical, and inconvenient, which is why we put it away so easily when life is full. We tell ourselves we need to be sensible and do the important things. We don’t have time to get muddy or make a mess.
We’re not made to put our creativity away. We need bakers, chefs, gardeners, artists, and writers. We need people who love texture, flavor, color, words and ideas. We need time to create unpolished versions of what we love because it changes ow we show up in the world. We are kinder. We are better problem solvers. We are calmer.
Annie doesn’t create for approval. She creates because it feels good and brings her joy. It engages her heart and makes her feel more alive.
We need more of that kind of creativity, from the heart, and uncomplicated. We don’t need a plan or a goal. Maybe we need to remember what we did before creativity got complicated.
So let’s be women who are willing to bring forth our creativity and celebrate the act of creating-whatever we choose to create. Let’s do it for ourselves and how it makes us a better human to show up for the rest of what life asks us to do. Let’s showcase our special flair.
I’ll be cheering you on…maybe while I pick up another knitting project,
I’ve created daily journaling prompts for you over on Pinterest. Follow me on Pinterest and save the journal prompts board. You’ll find a journaling prompt around creativity each day this month.
Here are the other blog posts in the picture book series
Here's the link to purchase Mudpie Annie if you'd like to pick up a copy for a child in your life.
🚂The Little Engine That Could 🚂
🐈The Cat That Climbed the Christmas 🐈
👎Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day👎
PS. If you’ve been practicing navigating discomfort by clearing your kitchen counters or declutter 3 things a day, way to go! Here’s the blog post if you missed it. 🤕Practicing Discomfort🤕** ..** Start today if you haven’t started yet. Keep going if you started last week.
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