Child-like Dreaming

It seems everywhere I turn I am surrounded by another couple with a new born baby. Today I ate lunch at Cracker Barrel. Next to me was a two year old-curly brown hair-blue eyed girl. She was beautiful. Her baby teeth were coming in and she didn’t know how not to smile. Sitting forward in a high chair made no sense to her. She kept turning around and high fiving me at my table. Who am I to say no to such as request?!

Sitting next to her made me start thinking about how simple yet freeing this child’s outlook on life was. I immediately thought about my six month old nephew and how he sees and interprets life. Children dream big. They live life big. They are completely submissive to their parents because they don’t have the ability to function appropriately to sustain their life, yet in the midst of their dependency they still find time to dream big. I guess it is because they have not learned to view life as scenery – as a simple back-drop while moving from one object to another. They are still immersed in the present, up to their eyes in colors, up to their ears in sounds, with fingertips that ache to touch everything and tongues to lick whatever their arms can hold. Children employ all of their senses. They take in the world and in turn allow themselves to dream big.

In short, children have imaginations. Our Christianized word for this is Revelation.

Maybe this is what Jesus means when he says the Kingdom of God is for children.

Isn’t the church’s job an imaginative one? Aren’t church members and Christ-confessors always attempting to form mental pictures of the self, the neighbor, the world, the future, and to envision new realities that are both engaging and transforming?

So why are children so much better at it than we are?

Have we as adults really been so overwhelmed by reality that it has caused us to lose our imagination or our revelation? Children look at stars and see hole punches in the sky and use combs for finding sea shells in the sand. Children’s imagination not only brings a level of joy and foolishness to their present life but it also demands an action on their part. Children dream big and then explore that dream.

There is something powerful here that we adults seem to miss. Reality, probability, and certainty have no place in the world of imagination. Literally, anything goes. What would the church look like if we allowed ourselves to re-imagine like we did as a child? We might just get a revelation from God.

Barbara Brown Taylor says,
In this imaginative act, we are grasped whole. Revelation is not a matter of thinking or feeling, intuiting or sensing, working on the left side of the brain or the right. It is a shocking gift of new insight that obliterates such distinctions, grabbing us by our labels and turning us around, so that when we are set back down again we see everything from a new angle.
We would reason differently, feel differently, and act differently. Imagination does more than affect us; it effects change in our lives. I implore you to never lose your child-like faith. It is what reveals a world of God’s love to you and allows you to play in that world with God.

Comments

Anonymous said…
JBO - a wonderful word for a world too caught in fear. If only we could trust that ABBA is there and we have nothing to fear. We are in His care and His grace is free. That could free us indeed!
February 21, 2009 at 5:57 PM
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