Sanctified Imagination

Though the earth give way
    and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
Though its waters roar and foam
    and the mountains quake with their surging

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God
    the holy place where the Most High dwells. - Psalm 46:2-4

The sons of Korah write these verses to inspire comfort, and they do so by invoking the imagination. You see, Jerusalem was ‘the city of God’ but there is no river running through Jerusalem. But in the imagination there is. This worship band put together these lyrics to help people’s minds wander to where God’s gentle flowing river is a place of peace and comfort in the middle of the crashing storm outside.

Can you use your imagination now to lean into some picture of comfort, to conjure up some place of peace? Can you imagine Jesus in that place, sitting with you, perhaps holding you or talking with you? Take some time to let your mind wander…

Here’s a scholar’s approach to the imagination, in case that helps you let loose a bit.

Imagination is the capacity to make connections between the visible and the invisible, between heaven and earth, between present and past, between present and future. For Christians, whose largest investment is in the invisible, the imagination is indispensable, for it is only by means of the imagination that we can see reality whole, in context. What imagination does with reality is the reality we live by. - Eugene Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant