Invitation and time travel
We all have seen the vivid imagination of our younger children when they jump in the air for example and believe they have just flown. This vivid imagination does stay with us as adults but it at times and for the most creative minds it turns them into authors, artists, song writers, entrepreneurs. But for others our vivid imagination becomes disordered fear. Fears allow us to project ourselves forward in time, a form of mental time travel. But in order to regain our vivid innocent imagination we need three steps, step one, let’s call fears stories, with characters, with us being the main character. In our fear/stories there are plots with beginnings, middles and ends. Our fear/stories have suspense, what will happen next? In step two instead of acting as the author of our fears, how about if we act as the reader of our fears. We can then decide as the reader what aspect of the fear is worth listening to. The reader needs the cool judgement of knowing that Immanuel our God with us, is often the author of our vivid imagination, but that we tend to respond to the worst possible outcome in the plot the easiest perhaps to imagine. Step three is to find Immanuel in the middle of our fear/story. There are subtler and slower disasters that are taking place, the silent build up of faithlessness. Fears allow us to glimpse what the future might be while there is still time to influence how the future might play out. Invite someone today to take a closer look at Christ and his church and imagine Immanuel within the outcome!
