Imagination and the Will

This blog is designed to give people an inner look at a devotional life. Taking time each day to spend time with the Lord. The hope is if you travel on this journey with Rev. Jacob Shaw, you may be more inclined to spend time with the Lord as well. I encourage the use of a devotional, a scripture reading and prayer, then finally some form of artistic mark to tie it all together. 

Today's devotional is taken from: Zacharias, Ravi. The Logic of God: 52 Christian Essentials for the Heart and Mind. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2019. [E-Book] Chapter 44: Imagination and the Will

Opening Thought: I really enjoyed today’s reading because Zacharias tells us about his son who was trying to write a story. His son, being young, becomes distraught when he realizes the story must go in a way he did not wish it to go. It made him sad even thought it was his own imagination which demanded the pathways for the story, for it to be a good story. I can appreciate the story going in ways you don’t anticipate, as someone who likes to write I have dabbled in fiction occasionally, and one thing I have always found is when you create dynamic characters, eventually it feels less like you are writing the story, and more like they are informing you how the story goes. It is like the words take on a life of their own and that is when you get the best stories.

Our imagination are very powerful things, if you train them well and nurture them, they can create a plethora of art and expressions which can enrich the world. I know one of the greatest joys of my life is my imagination. I spent much of my childhood, lost in the worlds my brain created, and many times as an adult I will slip back into those worlds for a little vacation.

Imagination can be a wonderful thing, but it can also be harmful if it learns to harness darkness, something we should keep in mind. I’m not talking about horror films here, rather, the same imagination that can tell stories, can spin lies and torcher people through words of rumor, the same imagination that can draw out pictures, can one day design the gas chambers to execute people in waves.     

The devotional begins with: Romans 1:21-23

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile, and their foolish hearts were darkened.  Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

Second Thought: One of the wonders of the bible, the creation story, is often shared but the subtle message it offers is often missed. We see a wonderful story of God creating everything, God creates the heavens and earth, day and night, the stars in the heavens, the plants, and the animals. All things every experienced in creation, in nature, is formed by the hands and will of God. Our imaginations are powerful, but they can only work with what we know. We can mix idea to create a hybrid idea, or we can abstract or take an idea to its absurdity to make an altered expression, but we cannot create an idea out of nothing. We can extrapolate, reverse engineer, we can exaggerate, our minds can do so many things, but original thoughts or ideas, ones that are not based on anything experience in the material world, is nearly impossible. We cannot even think of “nothing” without distorting the definition by envisioning something, like empty space, and black void, or something along those lines.

So when we think about God, creating all there is, we are thinking of the being that could look upon nothing and chaos, and create. We are thinking of the One who can actually have the original thought, the thought to inspire all thoughts, the imagination which inspires all imagination. It is like we are God’s story characters coming to life by the very force of God’s imagination. Maybe that is how it works for God, maybe His imagination just is, rather than a could be.

Continual Work: Spend some time using your imagination today. God gives us many gifts, don’t take them for granted. How might you be able to use your imagination to do some good for your household, community, or wider world?

What Rev. Jacob is Working On: As much as I love my imagination, sometimes my imagination can be a trap. It is very easy for me to get lost in my imagination. So it is always wise for me to plan imagination time to balance it with the more real world application time.

Prayer for your day: Lord, we thank You for our imaginations. Some of us use our imaginations to write fun stories, others to think and explore the metaphysical realities of Your existence, and others may use them to build homes and gardens to make our world a better place. If we come to use our imagination to serve You and Your creation, there is no shortage of what we can come up with. In Christ’s name we pray, Amen.

Artistic Close: The story of Alice and Wonderland is wonderful fantasy story of a girl who falls down a rabbit hole. An interesting thing about this novel is that it is classified as “literary nonsense”, (a precursor to the fantasy genre I'm guessing), but sometimes what is nonsensical oddly enough makes the most sense.

March Hare's Garden (1915) Scene Design for Alice in Wonderland in high resolution by William Penhallow Henderson. Original from The Smithsonian. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.