One of the best things about being a kid is making stuff up. Playing pretend and exploring the land of make-believe can provide hours of entertainment and stir creativity on play dates, road trips, and rainy days.
I can’t count the hours I spent building LEGO creations from all the leftover bricks, playing Starsky & Hutch in the backyard with friends, drawing fantastical scenes of outer space people and places, and constructing all kinds of forts with neighbors. Tree forts and couch cushion forts were almost an Olympic sport in our part of the neighborhood. Imagination dominated our lives!
So what happened? Why did our imaginations begin to evaporate when we hit adolescence? Why did we trade in our fictitious frenzy for a more “mature” life grounded in reality? We didn’t, really. Instead, we shifted how it operates in our lives.
We’re still pretending. We don’t call it make-believe, but we spend much of our adult life feigning to be someone or something that we’re not. We give the illusion that we have everything figured out and have the solutions to life’s greatest problems. We want to portray that our job, family, health, and relationships are all perfect. If you don’t believe it, take a look at how we curate what we share on our social media or choose to write about in the Christmas letter.
As people of Christian faith, we don’t have to pretend that we’re something we’re not. Jesus meets us where we are, loves us for all that we are and are not, and chooses to call us friend. Even more, he invites us to rekindle that child-like wonder and faith.
Jesus often showed a preference for hanging out with children and encouraged adults with sclerotic hearts to become more like children. He welcomed the children to the adult meetings, hoping to infuse a bit of awe and wonder into the conversation. Jesus celebrated when a boy was willing to share his sack lunch of fish and bread to help feed the crowd on the hillside. When asked about salvation, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” I wonder if part of his reasoning was to encourage practical, no-nonsense grown-ups to expand their ideas about life, faith, dependence, gratitude, and hope?
I remember a time when a friend accused me of playing with my make-believe friend named Jesus. It wasn’t when I was little, but when I was in college. They thought it was strange that I hadn’t jettisoned what they saw as futile, fairy tale faith in the God who chose to come and walk among us, speaking a word of forgiveness, lobbying for justice, and selflessly giving his life so that others might live. If God could do this through the person of Jesus, imagine what God can do through us?
Artist Makoto Fujimura in his book Art and Faith: A Theology of Making, argues, “To be human is to be creative…Cultivating our imagination is essential to fully realizing our potential as God’s creatures…It is impossible to have faith without imagination…Our ability to dream, to envision, the future in which justice reigns, is one of the great gifts of God to us.”
As you savor the final weeks of summer, take some time to dream and wonder. Walk, run, read, paddle, nap, daydream, or whatever it is that allows you to release the tension and stress of pragmatism and drift into the realm of imagination. This is not a disconnect from reality or a departure from your real life, but rather an essential component of your essence as both creature and creator. Imagine how God might be using your creativity and passions to rejuvenate you and plug into the world’s deepest need.
Wondering what God is up to next,
Pastor Lowell