When it comes to using imagination, small children are virtuosi—perhaps because their fresh minds have not yet been hedged in by the constraints of so-called “reality.” They can look up at the stars, for example, and see pinholes punched in a dark, velvet cloth that separates them from the everlasting brightness beyond. Or they can drape towels over their shoulders, grab a toilet brush scepter, and suddenly become royalty in some far-off, exotic kingdom.

Part of their secret, of course, is the natural ability small children seem to have of employing all of their senses. They have not yet learned to view the world around them simply as a flat backdrop to walk past on the way to somewhere else. They are still immersed in it—up to their eyes in colors, and up to their ears in sounds. Their other advantage is a blissful ignorance of the adult notion of what things are supposed to be and do. Adults may agree that a comb is for combing hair, but children are not nearly so limited. They recognize that a comb could also be a musical instrument, or a sifter for seashells hidden in the sand, or a ladder for the ants to climb.

Unfortunately, most of us lose that capacity, and lately I’ve been wondering why that is. Do we lose our imaginations to our schooling? Stars are not holes punched in the sky; they are astral bodies revolving in space. Or do we lose our imaginations to a growing mastery of the world? Our dream image of a chariot with six white horses fades as an actual red bicycle with streamers on the handlebars comes into focus. Or is losing our imaginations part of a natural process, like shedding baby teeth?

Whatever the reason, I believe that we need to recover our ability to imagine again. Indeed, if we are to see what God has in store for us, I think we need to participate in God’s imagination—to see ourselves, our neighbors, and our world through God’s eyes, full of possibility, full of promise, and ready to be transformed.

We sometimes act as if creation had been finished a long, long time ago … and there’s really nothing new on the horizon. But that’s certainly not what the Bible teaches. The Scriptures bear witness to the truth that the Holy Spirit still moves over the face of the waters, God still breathes life into piles of dust, and Jesus still shouts us free from our tombs.
I think it’s time to recover a sense of wonder again at the sheer joy and beauty of life itself. And to do that requires imagination—a willingness to be surprised, amazed, even awe-struck by the yet undreamt-of ways that God chooses to be revealed to us.