Moving past the war theme, I've been reflecting lately on our imagination and how it relates to knowing God. When asked to describe God, many of us use words like holy, loving, and good. While these are all true, they can often remain in the realm of the abstract. Your idea of love might look different than mine, and both of ours fail to encompass a full understanding of what God means when he says that he is love. Even when we use language to attempt a scientific definition, it can still lack warmth and life if it stays just in our rational mind.
Biblical definitions are the place to start in building an intellectual framework of understanding who God is. But what really moves our hearts is when we get internal pictures, words, or intuitive impressions of what God's love (justice, mercy, etc.) looks, sounds, and feels like. With these, our perception of him moves from distance and unknowability, to a nearness that we can understand. That's where our imagination comes in. To quote author Leanne Payne:
"The heart's capacity to see that which is true and real though invisible to the physical eye is not well understood in a day when the conscious and analytical ways of knowing are valued to the exclusion of the other. Both ways of knowing are important and complementary one to the other, and vital to belief."
In healthy relationships, there is not only an analytical understanding of the other person, but an intuitive sense of knowing and being known that transcends intellect. God is not an impersonal force, but a relational being who longs to reveal himself to us in personal ways. By praying, meditating on scripture, and being aware of his presence as we go throughout our days, we develop eyes that see, ears that hear, and a heart that is sensitive to how God is revealing himself in the moment. It's vital of course to evaluate individually and in community what we're seeing, hearing, and feelings against the Bible and what we know is true about God's character. It's also important to remember that not everything we receive is literal, and God speaks in parables and symbols throughout scripture. When Jesus refers to himself as the Vine and to us as the branches in John 15, he's not claiming a botanical physical makeup, but what we experience in him is like the vital connection between a branch and it's vine as the source of life.
Recently, after going through a rough week, I was being prayed for and feeling absolutely no connection to God. But instead of blaming God, or myself, and giving up, I chose to engage with God a bit longer, wanting to trust him even though I felt nothing. Suddenly, an image came to mind of the room in which I was being prayed for filling with angels and Jesus stepping out from behind me with a huge smile on his face! Though the previous hour of conversation had been bleak, this was so unexpected that I burst out laughing and was immediately filled with joy, a sense that all was well and that God had been there all along.
If someone had told me "Even in your pain, God has been here all along" it would have been true. But the image that I received from God carried that same truth with a weight that moved my heart. That experience with God has been a vehicle for deeper trust in his goodness even through the hard times. We can cling to the truths of scripture when the feeling is gone and God seems silent, but also rejoice when He allows those truths to apply to us in personal, experiential ways. Knowing the God of the universe personally is the most fulfilling experience we can have as humans, and makes for a life that is as exciting as we can imagine.
