You do not need to have an imagination for that impossible thing to change.
You know, that thing you actually kinda wish you’d stop hoping for, because it just seems completely out of the realm of possibility, not to mention that you’re weary of how longing for it to change at all just kinda makes your heart hurt-ache.
I tell myself this at 3 am, when I am laying in bed, and all the neurons of my mind are knot- tangled around some mess of a problem. After I’ve already gotten up for a glass of water, startled the dog who now keeps circling her bed basket, trying out an array of different contorted positions, and is now a middle-of-the-night reflection of my circling, restless mind.
After I’ve turned my pillow over again… I tell myself again:
You do not need to have an imagination for all the cascading dominoes that would have to miraculously happen so change could happen, so that the unlikely things would finally tip, and the whole landscape would shift, and you’d finally find yourself standing slack-jawed in a place you love, hugging someone you love with stunned, awed relief.
Abraham couldn’t imagine the way the map went. Sarah couldn’t imagine the way her fertility would go. And Joseph certainly couldn’t have imagined that the pit and the prison was his path to purpose.
I tell myself this and this is the sharp edge that slices right through the Gordian knots that have had me right wound and I exhale:
“You do not need a holy imagination for the impossible – you only need a holy God who is far greater than your imagination, who never stops working out the impossible.“
You don’t need a big imagination at all – you only need to leave it all in the hands of a big God.
You don’t have to muster up a large enough imagination for your story to change – your faith only needs to be in a larger God who still works change, exactly when nothing in your story, or you, feels like enough.
You do not need a holy imagination for the impossible – you only need a holy God who is far greater than your imagination, who never stops working out the impossible.
And what if the change God most often works isn’t so much in the circumstances of your life, but in the contours of your own heart? Isn’t the most impossible thing God works — is the work He does within the dark chambers of a human heart?
What always does the miraculous work of change isn’t so much human faculty, nor the fallibility of one’s own imagination; what does miraculous work of change is the will of God.
What we need more than God’s power to do the impossible thing is God’s wisdom to do whatever He determines is the best thing.
“What we need more than God’s power to do the impossible thing is God’s wisdom to do whatever He determines is the best thing.“
Maybe that’s the epiphany that turns on some interior nightlight on in the middle of a dark night of wondering how things could ever change:
It’s not that you just don’t need an imagination — it’s that it can sometimes be spiritually detrimental to have an imagination for how your story could change, if that means you’re saying you ultimately know what the best outcome, best case scenario, best story, even looks like. Hadn’t Jesus’ disciples had a real imagination for God’s kingdom — and it actually blinded them to the realest one? What you have an imagination for as an outcome — can secretly become a paint by number where you expect God to get all the colors right.
Maybe the thing is: Your future doesn’t need some vision board… like you need to have vision that focuses simply on God.
I breathe a bit slower, deeper, at 3 am when the mental knots in my mind loosen with just this relief:
You don’t have to see well enough – you only have to be dependent enough on God.
“You don’t need an imagination for the outcome—you need faith in the One who holds you no matter what comes.“
Imagination is picturing an outcome – but faith is trusting a Person to work it all out no matter what comes.
If faith only just imagining a better life, then wouldn’t that mean a life that doesn’t improve means someone should be victim-shamed and blamed for failing to have enough faith or imagination?
Our imaginations fail. Our God cannot.
Which means, yeah, just that:
You don’t need an imagination for the outcome—you need faith in the One who holds you no matter what comes.
You don’t need any imagination for the impossible, for God to still do the impossible.
“My imagination can run out — and then my faith can simply rest – and move on with God.“
Faith is exactly how we trust God with change that we can’t actually imagine.
I can’t really see it out our bedroom window, the July night sky pinned up with diamond stars, or the two guard dogs, Bethel and Bandit, laying large out there by the barn door, watching our wee flock of sheep sleep under the Big Deeper tipped over with hope. But you don’t need to see what is, or could be, when you’re letting go of sight to live by faith.
God’s painting a whole canvas of possibility far beyond the edge of every picture in any mind, and beyond the ceiling of our human conception, God’s conceiving greater things. Where my imagination runs out, my faith in God gets to keep running on. Which means: My imagination can run out — and then my faith can simply rest – and move on with God.
I want to rest right there:
“Faith leans on God to do what we can’t produce, or picture, but instead, only what He purposes. “
Right at the very frontier of the unimaginable, is where you find the faith to lean on the Way Himself.
Faith leans on God to do what we can’t produce, or picture, but instead, only what He purposes.
And you don’t have to see the way through your life – you only need the Way Himself to be the space where you live the whole of your life.
At 3 am, I can’t see the moon from my room – and I’m not sure I need to even picture it, before I can sleep, because I tell myself this at 3 am:
God wants to do more than answer whatever picture-perfect scenario you’ve drawn in your head — God wants to draw you close.
He is where you dream and rest.
How do you keep hoping for a way through?
How do you lean into the life you’ve always dreamed of — by leaning into Him and trust that it’s not too late for your life to really change and be made into a masterpiece of art?
What does it powerfully look like to have a new way seeing when everything feels really dark and impossible, , a new way of being that rests fully in the unwavering, unshakeable, hesed-lovingkind ways of God — especially now?
