In the publishing world, what a person creates belongs to him or her wholly and with no reservations. Come up with an idea for a new character? It’s yours and cannot be legally used by anyone else. An imaginary city? No one can live in it except the characters you invent. A catchy phrase? It is yours, and you own the rights to use it in any fashion you please, or even not to use it at all.
You don’t even have to copyright it. It is copyrighted, and you own the copyright, simply because it came from you as something original, apart and separate from anything anyone else has done.
Yet, breaches of copyright happen all the time. One of the greats in American history, Helen Keller, blind and deaf from early childhood, battled to become one of the most important spokespersons in the fabric of our country. At age 11, she laboriously wrote a charming tale called The Frost King. Later some suggested the story was eerily similar to The Frost Fairies by Margaret Canby.
Plagiarism? Breach of copyright? Stolen material, snatched from one to be claimed by another? Helen Keller was eleven, blind, and totally deaf. How could she steal another’s work for her own?
It is now generally believed that Helen may have been exposed to the story before her plunge into the darkness, and she imagined it to be her own.
Let’s place Helen’s experience in the context of the spiritual world. As humans, we are blind and deaf spiritually. We cannot see the hand of God in all that is around us, and we cannot hear his creation call out his glories every moment of the day. We only know what is immediate to us, what we can touch in the darkness.
It is easy to claim what belongs to another, and say that it is our own.
Ezekiel 29:3-5 tells us what happens when we claim what is rightfully God’s. Pharaoh made claims to be a god. He said, “My river is my own, and I have made it for myself.”
Poor Pharaoh, king of Egypt, blind and deaf soul wandering in the darkness, claiming all that he touched as his own. He saw the work of God’s hand, and he imagined it to be his own. God said otherwise, that Pharaoh had stolen the copyrights of God, and he would be punished for it.
God gives us the rights to use everything he has created. We simply need to remember that the copyright still belongs to him, that by the very nature of creation, God owns it all.
God offers us his creation. Our only cost is our praise and thanks unto him.
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