Imaginative Living
but just as it is written, “Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love Him.” 1 Corinthians 2:9 NASB
Not entered – How’s your imagination doing today? Is it robust and visionary, ready to explore all kinds of possibilities, even ones that might surprise you? Or are you experiencing rigidity, a kind of ossification of your dreams, desires and curiosity in order to maintain order and control? What matters most to you: the free flow of creative inspiration or mastery over the chaos and concerns of living? Don’t answer with what you wish were the case. Take a serious look at how you behave. What do you find?
Paul pushes us to imagine. In a loose translation of Isaiah 64:4, Paul goes so far as to say that we aren’t even capable of envisioning what YHVH has in store for those He loves. His grace is beyond the scope of our imagination. Doesn’t this imply that imagination is an acceptable path toward God’s goodness? It just isn’t quite sufficient. But that doesn’t mean it should be avoided. Imagination is the train that gets you on the right track. It just can’t quite arrive at the final station.
Roderick Logan notes that “van der Kolk and Perry both talk a lot about how imagination is lost in trauma and recovery includes restoring the victim’s imagination and the ability to see (forecast) oneself in a better place tomorrow.” He’s referring to Bessel van der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps the Score, and Bruce Perry, Brief: Reflections on Childhood, Trauma and Society. This is crucial because sin is trauma. Sin upsets the human dynamic wired into who we are. It produces distorted pictures of our abilities and disabilities, our relationships or lack of relationships and our purpose. There might not be a “clinical” definition of sin, but we all know that the experience of sinful behavior pushes shame, guilt and remorse upon us. Sin undoes us. That is trauma. What this means is that our sins blunt our imaginative processes. We see less, hear less, dream less, understand less. We are diminished in every way. Recovery from sin entails restoration of imagination, and that means we will experience greater insights, bigger visions, greater purpose and more integrated living. In fact, according to Paul, we will once more be on the track toward something we can’t even conceive. Life will be exciting, surprising and joyful.
But there’s another implication. If spiritual restoration brings back robust imagination, what do we say about those whose lives pursue a rigid structure and strict control? What do we say about the man who will not entertain any change in his point-of-view? What do we say to the one who claims that he has the definitive truth and no more exploration is necessary? A curtailed imagination might be the signal that something is amiss.
Topical Index: imagination, not entered, trauma, 1 Corinthians 2:9
What about the sin done TO us in our insufficiency to comprehend love enough; so as to not be entrapped by that imposed trauma on our Impressionable Lack which is actually our imagination damaged so greatly that the producing of the faith to believe in what we cannot see or hear could be better than the now. Such a one’s senses have been overpowered & blown into distortions of a hopeless unreality being a better certainty. Rigid is a cage… yes. But neither of us can reach each other to hurt & I can prowl about in it, in a certain confidence. A false truth and a paradigm of incessant grieving. Yes forecasting is faith but that is for those with faith not stolen.
Thank you Skip! After several months of self evaluation and all kinds of processing I finally came to a focusing in on my “dream” and career path for my future. However last night something I came across threw me in a tailspin and I wasn’t sure how to recover from it. This gave me back my wind after the sucker punch to the gut! I know that we seldom know how God uses us each day so I wanted you to know that today He used you to restore my dreams.
Cheryl
Few weeks back on a post from Jonathan sacks he had said that the Israelites were given God’s word. His instructions. His Torah and within it there were supposed to be visions that the Israelites could see their path ,and what they needed to do to change to fit the path. I think it had to do with one of his prayer posts recently.
Isn’t the intellect the cradle for sin?
And isn’t the new birth of one’s spiritual insight
God’s revealed pathway out?
When one’s faith allows the intertwining of the intellect
with its true base spirituality, confusion results, rigid ruts are
easily formed, and faith no longer stands, but rather sits like
a carried card in a wallet.
But intellect is not the culprit here. One of the gifts of God to Man is the ability to think, to investigate, to critically review, to analyze. If you take that away, you have robots. No, it isn’t intellect that’s the enemy (as many fundamentalists might preach), it’s bending the will and the intellect to serve our own ends, to make ourselves into the little gods of control so that the world works according to our desires.
I didn’t say that intellect is the culprit.
It’s the seat from whence man’s will makes his choices,
good, bad, or indifferent. But man can choose beyond the
intellect. Isaiah said “till the Spirit is poured upon us from on high”,
indicating God has available for us a higher plane from which we
can operate. Perhaps, I could have been clearer.
“Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality” said the Cheshire Cat from the book Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. As for me, it is not the “reality of the world” I need to war against, but the false reality I have constructed in my psyche.
For some of us, the emotional and physical trauma we experienced in childhood didn’t just leave a scar, but an entire superstructure that is faulty. The hidden land-mines of shame and guilt which detonate unawaringly fragment into feelings of low self esteem, depression and hopelessness. These destructive emotions become the indestructible furnishings of my house. Alas, I have spent years attempting to rearrange the furniture (even reupholstering some) in the many rooms of my ramshackled mansion, but the truth is the house needs to be demolished and a new one built upon solid foundations, better materials and a new blueprint. Yeshua said: “Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved. Matthew 9:17
As with the spiritual, so with the natural. So if this means war, then let me not stay sitting uncomfortably on the sidelines, rearranging the deckchairs, waiting for clearer instructions or the encouragement of others, because those who are speaking are not warring, but are they who have found a comfortable sofa on the sidelines…afraid of the dark, the noise, the pain, the unknown. If I die, at least let me die a man and not the scared, scared child created by my reaction to my father’s strong hand and harsh words.
Michael, I think I might play around with putting part of the above into a song. It’s that good!
I, too, am struggling, really struggling, with how to walk righteously with unrighteous people – specifically, fathers. As a parent, I have a unique perspective on the failings of parents, but as a child, I also have an equally valid voice on the subject.
I have decided to take my parent’s words at face value, when he says he wants reconciliation, but as a child, I have also decided that I have the authority to require him to act on those words BEFORE I act on them. This is because I have learned that it is wrong to trust someone else’s position before they demonstrate that they do. In fact, it is a form of mutual manipulation, where the person who requires you to accept them a certain way (which is manipulating you) expects you to respond by doing that WITHOUT requiring them to demonstrate it first. If you do respond, however, you are, in the parlance of the social contract, ‘fronting’ good will, or investing, if you like, in the expectation that the other will live up to their end of the contract that they just handed you (likewise manipulation). We do this game all the time, but is it Biblical?
In the Bible, I see that if someone has wronged another, they must recompense them back, PLUS 20%. Parents owe their children shalom. If there is a disconnect, I hold that it is the PARENT who must make the moves of reconciliation, but also the moves of restoration, too (there’s that extra 20%). I think it is the child’s responsibility to be accepting of that effort, as well as mirroring that effort back. . If the parent does not actively put forth effort, and demonstrate their willingness to face previous avoidance of the suffering of fracture, too, then the reconciliation does not have a proper platform.
You learned fear, I see. I learned self abandonment from mine, as well as to mitigate the abandonment of others (performing for love). As an adult, I have the power to make another set of choices, and not to ‘trigger’ on those learned expectations. We learn to do to ourselves what others did to us. It is not love when I ignore, excuse, mitigate or accept their sin by reproducing it towards myself. If I am still suffering from their sin, it is a good sign that I have not rejected that sin completely; it still has power over me. I must put God back on the throne in that place. In fact, to restore love for the sinner, I MUST learn to hate their sin, first! And quit participating and perpetuating it (in the name of love, of course). To walk in the truth means that I have to learn to speak it and apply it, too. So help me, God!
I am struggling with this same situation with my own children, too. I can see that it is up to me to repair the bridges we must walk across, even though they get to choose whether or not they will. It has been frustrating to me that I cannot build the bridges to my parents, at least in the areas that their past choices broke the connection – I have had to wait until they get to that place – but I need to turn around and take out that frustration in extra efforts to build them toward my own children. This is new territory for me, y’all. Still don’t know much, yet! Would love somebody else’s experience to show me how this is supposed to work!
Welcome back Laurita! We missed you and your comments, but your brief absence only made our fondness for your perspicacious observations grow.
My words might be wrangled into a song or sonnet, but first please weave yours into a tome or treatise.
Um, I thought my words were already (unfortunately) woven so…
A BOOK. A Real book…OK, “another” book besides the “31 Days of Transformation, by Skip Moen, D.Phil and Laurita Hayes” (available on this site or Amazon). You probably have a dozen or more woven and already penned or either “in you” waiting to escape onto paper. Publish or perish is the motto in academia. But here… publish (so we can) cherish is more apropos.