“…somewhere along the way, most of us stop living out of our imagination and start living out of our memory. We stop creating the future and start repeating the past. And that is the day we stop living and start dying.” - Primal by Mark Batterson (pp.90-91)
When I was a boy, I loved the Tarzan TV show. My street was an invisible jungle, and I would jump around on invisible vines and do heroic things that imaginary heroes did. One day, however, while I was playing Tarzan with my next door neighbor, I did the full-on Tarzan yell… and he punched me hard in the stomach. To this day I don’t know why he did it, but he was laughing as he ran away, so maybe he just thought it was a funny thing to do. The point is- I never played Tarzan again- ever.
Life is messy and you will get hurt. The hurt you get in life is one of the main creator of memories, the ones where you remember pain and work out ways to avoid it in the future. You begin to live by your memories as a defense against future pain. Soon enough, the memories crowd out the imagination.
Imagination stops where memory starts.
Fortunately, with God, imagination can regain the ground it lost when we suffered pain. Ezekiel 36:26 tells us that we will have our pain-hardened hearts removed and replaced with soft hearts, hearts that can freely imagine again. We can learn to be the heroes the world needs because we are ready to imagine the way children do, with no fear of pain.
Imagination is not for children only. As a Christian, it is crucial to life. How?
Hope is the air Christians breathe. Romans 5:3-5 spells it out clearly. Hope is the future lived out today in our imagination. Faith, according to Hebrews 11:1, is the constant taking of breath, the action that brings the air into our souls. Think about it, why is something astoundingly imaginative called breath-taking? Our ability to imagine was given to us by God to use for our whole lives.
Satan, too, knows of both the power and importance imagination has. That’s why he wants to crush it out of our lives at every chance. He knows that if we just hold on to the pains of life and live through their memories, then he can choke off our air. He knows it will slowly kill us.
Our God is an imaginative God- creation itself proclaims it- and we are made in His image. We are meant to breathe the fresh air of imagination, not the poisoned air of relived memories. What memories of pain are holding you back from doing something imaginatively breath-taking for God? Maybe it’s time to get some fresh air.
