Tonight we continued our alphabet series ‘The A-Z of Christian Faith’, looking at ‘I is for Imagination.’ Imagination is often much derided in our Western culture; whilst we accept the role of the imagination in children, as adults, we tend to feel that we need to concentrate on facts and dismiss the importance of imagination as something we need to grow out of. If, however, God ‘is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us’ (Eph 3:20), perhaps we need to look at the role of the imagination in developing a life of robust faith!
Imagination is defined as ‘the ability of the mind to be creative or resourceful’ and ‘the faculty or action of forming new ideas or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses’. This is, of course, what raises alarm bells, for we are wary of anything we cannot define according to the practical world of the senses. The imagination can, of course, be misused, but God wants us to be connected to the invisible world which can be seen only by the eyes of faith, and the imagination is one of the tools He gives us to develop those eyes.
Plutarch said, ‘What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality’, something we see in the life of Abraham who when ‘everything was hopeless, believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do but on what God said he would do. And so he was made father of a multitude of peoples.’ (Rom 4:17, The Message) Imagination is the ‘mental tool we have for connecting material and spiritual, visible and invisible, earth and heaven’ (Eugene Peterson, ‘Under the Unpredictable Plant’, P 171); Abraham was able to imagine the son he could not see and therefore came, by faith, to see that reality.
We need to dream and imagine great things in God, because that is the way we get to see and experience those things. As God gives us impossible visions, dreams that are way beyond our capabilities or abilities, He wants us to learn to trust Him to do that which is impossible, so that, in the words of Sri Chinmoy, ‘I begin by imagining the impossible and end by accomplishing the impossible.’ What a God we serve! – one who ‘can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams!’ (Eph 3:20, The Message) It’s time to dream with God.
