Starving Writer's Imagination Seeks Audience of One

Is your imagination starved? I know mine is. Does your imagination look towards the heavens or at an idol? By idol, I mean work, leisure time, your spouse, yourself.

I’ve come to the harsh reality that my imagination is starving to death. Oh it is active enough! The writer’s imagination is never silent or stoic. It skips rapidly from one creative rock to another along the stream of life.

That isn’t my problem. My starvation comes from what the said stream retains.

The children of Israel starved their imagination by looking upon the face of idols. Isaiah, in his wisdom, reminded them to look to the heavens. Nature is God’s creative autograph of His Glory and Power.

"Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens:
    Who created all these?
He who brings out the starry host one by one
    and calls forth each of them by name.
Because of his great power and mighty strength,
    not one of them is missing." Isaiah 40:26 NIV

Our ability to imagine is limitless. Why then - and I speak to myself – do we limit God?

Oswald Chambers wrote, “Imagination is the power God gives a saint to position himself out of himself into relationships he never was in.” 1

With recent fussing and fidgeting before God, it came to me with surprising clarity how small I have made my Lord. I minimize my creator in so many ways. Doubting His love, doubting His presence, worrying about that medical bill and how it will get paid, choosing to act without clear direction because I think He’s late, or… helping my sacrifice off the alter because I don’t see it’s replacement in a thicket.

Since childhood my imagination has been my friend, confidant, therapist, and cheap entertainment. Upon a moment’s notice from boredom, stress, or trauma, my imagination has been at the ready and available. It is infinitely easier to slay imaginary dragons, take down enemies, and fall in love in my imagination.

But it has also been my undoing. A two-edged sword.

Like the Israelites, I have let my perception of God and His attentiveness in my life be dictated by what I imagine Him to be – not experiencing who He is.

As I shed what this world has taught me about myself, I long to see my creator and myself not through the eyes of my imagination, but through the eyes of Truth and clarity.

^“And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate^[a] the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” 2 Corinthians 3:18 NIV

¹ My Utmost for His Highest

Sacrificial Ashes

What happens when we take our sacrifice off the alter when God tells us to leave it there?

When God always calls us to place what we treasure on the alter, is it to see if we love Him enough? Is it to test us? I don’t know. I know for me, it was to see if my obedience outweighed what my heart desired.

I failed miserably.

I tied my treasure to the alter and waited like all obedient children do. Then, as time ticked on, my sacrifice’s replacement (i.e. ram) didn’t show. Where was my ram in the thicket? I looked and looked. Surely the Lord would provide a replacement for my treasure!

Not finding one, I felt it necessary – nay my duty – to untie my treasure and help it off the alter. Then the Lord asked, “Where is your sacrifice?” With a shameful shuffle, I tied it back up (loosely mind you, you never know when you might need it), stepped back in pious religiosity, then went on the hunt for its replacement yet again.

With each pious conviction and rebinding, the sacrifice ropes became looser and looser until eventually the treasure slipped off the alter unaided. I kept waiting for Him to allow me to keep my sacrifice, all the while He kept waiting for me to allow Him to keep it.

God is quite patient with our humanity, but there will come that fateful day when, before you can untie it again, He sends Holy Fire to consume the sacrifice He chose for YOU to offer.

It is agonizing to watch a treasure you have longed for burn. The fire is Holy and from His heart, but it still sears your being.

My soul wailed at the site of my incinerated treasure.

But Lord – you didn’t send a ram, what was I to do?

Wait. That is what you do. You wait.

My beautiful treasure – one I’d waited many years for – lay in ashes at the alter because I couldn’t – wouldn’t – wait for my ram.

So what is one to do when their treasure lay at God’s alter in ashes?

Wait ...

... for the ashes to soak into the soil during the spring rains.

... for the ashes to feed future seeds.

Wait ... with thanksgiving and praise to see the peaceable fruit of righteousness rise from the ash-sodden soil.

Label Maker

I’ve never been one to buy according to a label.  If there is a comparable item at a lower price, then I consider it a deal.  But the Pharisee within me doesn’t buy the deal. The Pharisee only sees through the eyes of a label.

When it comes to humanity:

Labels = Impressions

Impressions = ideas

Ideas = prejudices

I would have hoped that my years in ministry would have peeled this from my inner sanctum, but no.  My religiosity has created so many new labels to slap on some unfortunate soul.  When I see an obese person, I slap on the label “glutton”. When I see an overweight individual -  “lazy”. When I see someone wearing dirty clothing or unwashed hair -  “unclean”.  When I witness a frustrated mother and a loud child arguing - ”undisciplined.”

My inner label maker is quick to the draw too. Within a nano-second, I can label just about anyone that walks by.

In my job I am constantly organizing something that needs files. In order to know what is in the file, I slap a label on it. Every time I see that file, I know what it contains.

So convenient.

So organized.

So unfair to humanity.

Jesus was the incarnate Heart of God toward humanity and if Jesus truly owns my heart than why do I do this?

If, as the Word says, I am turned or changed into the same I reflect, why am I not reflecting Christ instead of pasting labels? “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.” (2 Corinthians 3:18)

Because instead of my mind and heart being riveted on the Risen Christ and how He sees people, I am consumed with how they appear to me.

And thus…how I appear to them.

Brennan Manning wrote, “Contemplative awareness of the risen Jesus shapes our resemblance to Him and turns us into the persons God intended us to be.” Abba’s Child.

I guess if I contemplated my Jesus more, I would reflect Him more. If I reflect Him more, I will see as He sees. If we Christians contemplated Christ as much as we contemplate our navel, or one another, we would see as He sees.

Besides contemplating my navel makes a crick in my neck.