One of the great duties of the Christian mind is imagination. It is not the only thing the mind does. The mind observes. The mind analyzes and organizes. The mind memorizes. But imagination is different. It does not observe or analyze what we see; it imagines what we can't see, but what might really be there.
God's world--all of it--rings with wonders. The imagination calls up new words, new images, new analogies, new metaphors, new illustrations, new connections to say old, glorious truth. Imagination is the faculty of the mind that God has given us to make the communication of His beauty beautiful.
Don't mistake what I am saying. Poets and painters and preachers don't make God's beauty more beautiful. They make it more visible. They cut through the dull fog of our finite, fallible, sin-distorted perception, and help us see God's beauty for what it really is. Imagination is like a telescope to the stars: It doesn't make them big. They are big without the telescope. It makes them look like what they are.
Dear God and Creator and Father,
I praise You for Your infinitely wise imagination!
I bow with wonder at Your power to put in place
the universe so full of marvels for our joy.
I pray for the grace of imagination,
lest I fail to love my fellow man
and fail to render Your glory
for what it really is,
most beautiful of all beauties.
Through Christ, I pray,
Amen.
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