Engaging our imaginations and living creatively should not be seen as child’s play or as a privilege for select vocations such as artist or author. To think along these lines is to deny our heritage. Poet Luci Shaw asserts “We who believe we bear God’s image must realize that the image includes the capacity to imagine and create, because God is himself an imaginative Creator.”
In fact, God is the ultimate creator. The Trinity came up with the idea for snow, giant sequoias, watermelons, rainbows, hummingbirds, dolphins, and the particulars of procreation. The Trinity also decided that every snowflake and every human should be unique.
You may not write novels or paint portraits, but you have the capacity to bring order, solve problems, and make beautiful things, which is what being creative is all about.
A vibrant, rooted-in-God imagination also serves our relationships, particularly marriage and parenting. There are many times in the course of our lives when we feel stuck. In these situations, imagining something new is, in and of itself, “an act of hope.”1 When we imagine what our marriage or a particular friendship might look like in five or ten years, we are choosing to believe that there is a future and we have some agency in it. This confronts any of the powerlessness or hopelessness that linger because the specifics we had previously imagined did not come to pass or because we’re being told—subtly and sometimes not so subtly—that the world does not want what we have to offer.
Walter Brueggemann, one of the most influential Old Testament scholars of the twenty-first century, writes, “The task of the prophetic imagination . . . is to cut through the despair and to penetrate the dissatisfied coping that seems to have no end or resolution.” Our imaginations should be able to transcend the present moment, even when hope is waning or circumstances portend doom because it’s God’s power and inexhaustible hope that fuels our imagination.
Faith and imagination are synergistic. None of us have ever seen God face-to-face. To step over the line from unbelief to belief, we must extrapolate who God is based on the knowledge we’ve gleaned from Scripture, others’ testimonies, and our personal experiences of encountering Jesus. Since none of these prove the existence of God, the Holy Spirit inspires our imagination—or faith—tipping the balance away from doubt toward belief.
In the same way that a faith-filled imagination can help us to move from skepticism to faith in our relationship with God, it can help us move from unhappiness or dissatisfaction to contentment and delight in our marriages and other relationships. Sometimes, this can be as simple as a quick prayer: “God help me to see our potential. Help me believe that change is possible.” And then waiting in holy anticipation. Sometimes it takes years of hard work, counseling, extended prayer, and staying present in the seemingly impossible moments that are part of every friendship.
While we can receive ideas or inspiration from watching how other people make relationships work, we need to steer clear of envy and avoid trying to copy someone else’s life. When I respect and admire someone else, I’m open to learning from them and can simultaneously remain in a place of gratitude. When I envy someone else, gratitude often gets swallowed up by entitlement and I am easy given to fault-finding and criticism.
To ignite our imaginations and keep them burning, we need to understand the role of criticism because nothing douses our imagination more quickly than incessant or insensitive critique. This will be the topic of my next post.
You can read more on this in my new book, Marriage in the Middle, published by InterVarsity Press.
Photo by Everton, Unsplash.