OUR STORY
Welcome to The Refined Creative - a place for you to be encouraged, loved on, prayed over, served, and inspired. Kaitlin here! Maddie and I started this sweet community for a few reasons, and we want to share that with you! Back in the summer of 2019, Jesus was stirring heavily in mine and Maddie’s heart. Maddie began to feel led to start a community group where she could share her heart, do devotions, and grow in community with other women. During this time, I also felt a tug in the direction of wanting community. Maddie mentioned to me that this was something that the Lord laid on her heart, and I immediately felt like the Lord was calling me to do it alongside her. However, in that particular season, neither of us were ready to jump into it. We constantly talked about it, but never took any initiative to start because we didn’t know what that looked like.
Fast forward to summer 2020, the Lord started tugging on both of our hearts again. There are a LOT of small details that I will leave out, but long story short, I mentioned to Maddie 4 TIMES over the course of 3 months that I felt like in some way we were meant to work together. I had totally forgotten about the community group that we had talked about in the past, I just knew the Lord was calling us into something really exciting together. In August, Maddie and I (and our hubby’s) took a little vacation together and we spent the entire week pouring our hearts out to each other. Maddie suddenly felt the Lord reminding her of the community group he laid on her heart last year and as soon as she mentioned it to me, I told her this was it.
It finally became clear to both of us that He had been leading us to this for well over a year. So, we decided to take the leap and pray about it. The Lord made it so clear to us that this was our mission together and praying through it, we realized that the time was now. So, The Refined Creative came about. But where did we get the name?
It’s a pretty interesting story, but I will try to make it short and sweet. For those of you who don’t know, Maddie and I have have been best friends for about 5+ years (pre-photography), and our husbands are also best friends. So, we talk basically every single day. There was one day a couple of months ago, as we were praying over RC, that Maddie and I were talking on the phone. Maddie was explaining what the Lord was teaching her in her life and in the middle of the conversation, she had a HUGE God moment. The word “refine” had been something that had been on her mind for a couple of weeks as He was refining a lot of things in her own life. In that moment, she was like, “WAIT. REFINE. OMG that’s the word.” In other words, He made it really clear to her that the word “refine” wasn’t just about what He was doing in her life. We just didn’t know yet that it would be part of the name of our community. A few weeks later, I was on my way home from Florida and I spent hours praying over this “thing” that Maddie and I were planning to do together. I was listening to a book that talked about creativity. The concept that I remember and specifically wrote down was that creativity stems from wisdom. God gives us wisdom by refining us in all different seasons of life through experiencing answered prayers. From wisdom comes integrity, creativity, and excellence. Therefore, creativity is not separate from Jesus, it comes from the Lord. After hearing this concept fully explained I suddenly heard “The Refined Creative” SO clearly. I thought maybe I was thinking about it too hard but I couldn’t get it out of my brain. It was so evident that it was the name of our community. It blew my mind and scared the heck out of me to believe it, so when I was telling Maddie, all I could do was laugh in nervousness because I thought it was nuts that I heard it so clear, and I thought she was going to be like, “nahhh I don’t like it".” As soon as I finished her jaw dropped and she said “I love it.” Whew.
Since then, it has been a heck of a lot of planning for the future and how we can best serve and love on other creatives. Our mission is to foster community with and encourage creatives to walk in their calling with the Lord, reach their full potential in life, and run a Jesus inspired business. And what is a refined creative? A person who experiences growth by the removal of unfit desires and elements by God, replacing them with wisdom and desires that cultivate creativity for His purpose. We both feel that God has done this for ourselves and equipped us to lead others in being their own kind of refined creative. We are PUMPED to go on this journey with you and have a community that refreshes the soul. We hope to see you at our monthly meet-ups starting January 26th, 2021. You DON’T want to miss this!
