God has designed us to be a people of stories. Every night as we gather around our dinner table we share stories.
And yet, after I finished college, I set aside fiction reading for many years. Non-fiction seemed practical. Fiction seemed frivolous. Why listen to stories, when you can learn facts?
Some years back, I picked up fiction again, and I realized that in setting fiction aside for a diet of only non-fiction, my imagination shriveled, and my ego grew. Humility begets imagination, and imagination fosters humility.
Who would have imagined this world we are living in? No one would have predicted a year ago that our lives would have looked like this.
Peanut Butter and Jelly
Our default is to project forward in the narrow bandwidth of what has been. COVID-19 ought to humble every one of us. Who among us can possibly predict the future? When we read the Bible, it’s clear the future that awaits us is beyond our imagination. When we consider the return of Christ, God’s judgment on humanity, and what the new heavens and the new earth will be, we have some biblical framework. But not one of us has a clue of its inexpressible glory.[i] This knowledge ought to humble us and temper our confidence in knowing what awaits us tomorrow, or next year, or in the next decade.
The peanut butter to humility’s jelly is imagination. One of the gifts this season ought to give us is to stretch our creativity and expand the horizons of what we think is possible. We’ve tamed Christianity too much. Let’s let it loose.
Stories That Make Us Blush
When we pick up the Bible, we read fantastical stories. God creates the universe out of nothing, the Red Sea stands at attention with a path straight through it for the escaping Israelites, Jonah is tossed into the tempestuous ocean only to be swallowed by a great fish, Jesus plods on top of the waves of the Sea of Galilee. As a modern audience, we can blush when we read these stories. The faith we preach can filter out the miraculous.
We might not say it out loud, but our Western minds tend to strip the Bible of the absurd. We reduce Christianity to a system: propositional beliefs and principles. When we do that, the Bible becomes bloodless, our Christianity a mere skeleton of what God intends it to be.
Much of our Christianity today lacks holy imagination: it’s all ribs and femurs, no flesh and blood.
Enter COVID-19. The impossible has happened. A global pandemic seemingly out of the pages of a science fiction novel has swept across the world. Everything we thought we knew, everything we were preparing for, has been toppled. But it is not all bad that we feel less certain about what lies ahead than we used to. In the wake of this pandemic, may the church grow in humility and imagination.
Prayers for Humility
My prayer is that the gift of humility:
1. Leads to deepened empathy: the less certain we are that we have all the answers, the deeper our empathy can be.
2. Makes the church more servant-hearted: the humbler we are, the fewer acts of service feel below us.
3. Strengthens trust in leaders: when our leadership is predicated not on our leaders’ confidence but on humility, trust multiplies.
Prayers for Imagination
My prayer is that the gift of imagination:
1. Leads the church to a new season of creativity: I pray that artistic and organizational and programmatic creativity are heightened as the bandwidth of the possible is widened.
2. Grows our trust in our unfathomable God: when God isn’t contained by tidy statements of belief, but in actually experiencing him, our trust grows.
3. Makes us more sensitive to the realities of the spiritual world: when we stop believing that only what we see is real, then we have a greater capacity to understand the spiritual world around us.
Just as fiction did to me, may COVID-19 stoke the church’s imagination and bring about a new season of humility that points to the character of the great hero of the greatest story: Jesus Christ.
Photo by Clever Visuals on Unsplash
[i] The same could be said about the eternal punishment that waits the one who rejects Christ.