I love my imagination. I can remember using it to play make-believe when I was little or to daydream when I was bored in school. As I have gotten older, I have discovered that there are other things that I can do with my imagination. Some like creative problem solving and writing can be used in God-honoring ways. But others like fantasizing as a way of dealing with uncomfortable feelings or imagining what I would like to do to people who bother me don't honor God. I am also realizing that they are not healthy for me. Over the past 2 months I have been learning a lot about how to take unhealthy thoughts captive and I think that this has been very helpful. It has been even more helpful to learn about how I can use my imagination to actually encounter God and grow my faith.
We spend a lot of time praying and it's easy to become distracted or bored after a while. We studied Revelation 4 in my Tools for the Prayer Room class. The teacher had us close our eyes and imagine this scene in heaven while we were praying. I discovered that it was much easier to stay engaged in prayer when I was imagining my prayers coming before a real throne that I could see in my imagination. I have also been studying Ezekiel 1, Revelation 1 and Revelation 19 to get additional ideas about what Jesus looks like. I try to picture Him in my mind when I close my eyes and begin praying. There are lots of descriptions that I don't understand, but this leads me into prayer too. I start asking Jesus what certain things mean and for more revelation. I consecrate my imagination to Him and ask Him to use it to help me know Him more.
In another class, we learned a technique to use when reading through the Gospels. This technique reveals what God is like by helping us understand how Jesus interacted with people. First, pick a scene or a passage from the Bible to meditate on. Read it several times and then start breaking it into chunks. Ponder what this was actually like when it happened and ask Jesus to reveal what He was thinking and feeling in that moment. Use your imagination to picture the weather, the time of day, the natural smells and sounds of the scene, and what the expression on Jesus' face would have been. Ask God what this reveals about your heart and how you need to respond to what He is showing you. Imagine that you are one of the people that Jesus is addressing and how you would have felt in that experience.
I've also been attending a class on Fridays called Holy Fascination through the Kansas City Healing Community. They are primarily an inner-healing group, but they also teach classes to help people imagine scenes from the Bible and use their imaginations to meet with Jesus. This has been interesting too because I'm reading a lot about inner healing right now. I really want to be able to do serious restoration work (Isaiah 61 level) and most profound inner healing techniques involve asking Jesus to come and visit people in their traumatic memories. I'm practicing using these techniques on myself to see how they might work for others and I have been really encouraged by the results.
The combination of all of these things is that I am using my imagination much differently. Whenever I start to use it, I am training myself to imagine that Jesus is there with me. If I am trying to use my imagination to escape something, then Jesus is there with me and we can have a dialogue about what is bothering me. I find it much harder to fantasize when Jesus is standing next to me in my imagination and I find it much easier to choose to love and obey Him when I can imagine Him as a real man. This has also been helping me to grow in my belief that God enjoys me even in my weakness. I know that God is mostly glad, but that doesn't feel true when I am struggling with sin and having to talk with Him about it. If I take a minute to first imagine that God is giving me a great big smile and telling me that He is happy that I want to connect with Him, then that difficult conversation becomes much easier. I feel much more natural grief over hurting His heart with my sin and a much greater desire to turn and walk in obedience when I picture Jesus as a real person that I want to be in relationship with. I am discovering that this, like everything else, is a process, but I am excited that God is redeeming my imagination and teaching me how to use it for His glory and my pleasure. J
No comments:
Post a Comment