Imagine this:
Floating down the river with my little brother. I was thirteen. He was eight. The bright sun winked on the rippling water. We floated on inner tubes with faces pressed against the water’s surface in search of fish, golf balls, or whatever. Two boys savoring a summer day. Then I heard dark laughter on the hill and looked up to see bare-chested high schoolers with sinister intent in their eyes. I had never seen them before and wished they would go away. They called us names and chucked rocks in our direction. Their aim was awful and I let them know it. My words provoked nothing but rage and they trudged heavily through the underbrush and stepped into the river. They were bigger up close and in person. I was unafraid, used to seeing and fully expecting a pushing fight.
“What did you say?” said the ugly one. He menaced over me as I remained prone on the inner tube.
I was brash and naive to the world of high school conflict. “You heard me,” I said.
He balled up his hand into a fist and sank it deep into my eye socket. There was force behind his punch and he lifted me off the inner tube. I fell back on the tube and clutched its side because the world was spinning and grew dark. As the windows of my world dimmed, I saw the strangers plowing through the water with high steps. One of the boys held his hand while the other comforted him in his pain.
It took all my mental attention to keep from succumbing to darkness.
“Lead me to the bridge, Nate,” I whispered to my brother.
He lead me three hundred yards downstream to the bridge. I held the tube like I held my consciousness: desperately, afraid of slipping into the river and sinking to the stones below.
My little brother, silent and strong, lodged me between boulders beneath the bridge.
“Run home and get mom,” I whispered and then I focus on a small point in my brain while the walls closed in. I heard my brother’s bare feet slapping the stones as he scrambles up to the main road.
Maybe I slept, maybe I didn’t. The mile and half of hot asphalt must have blistered my brother’s little feet. I never asked. I only remember the long wait, the closing walls, and then the fragile call of my mother as she inched down the gravel and river rock to where I was lodged.
We made it home. I’m not sure how.
One week later, the pain was still severe. As the swelling decreased, I found my vision shambled. I could see double. I could look straight ahead and still see the objects to my left as if they were right in front of me. It was a gift for a lad who wanted to covertly assess the opposite sex, but the throbbing pain persisted and I was frightened. Dad decided to have a test taken. I remember the night that he took me to the hospital and they slid me into a doughnut shaped machine. The scan was a long process, made longer by the storm outside. Lightning shut the power down twice, forcing emergency generators to kick in. Each time the power went down, we had to start the test over.
They tried to explain the results to me in language a kid could understand. The moment the fist struck my eye, the bones in my face cracked and opened. In that instant, the muscles in my eye were jolted and finally lodged in the fissure that opened. When the facial bone came together again, the ligaments were trapped, inducing the double vision and pain. The folks in lab coats called it a blowout fracture. All I knew was that everything I looked at was skewed, dizzying, and doubled.
Our lives are not very different from my boyhood vision problems. We are a people characterized by pain, by fracture, and by disjunction. Even as a boy, I knew that I could not live the rest of my life with such severe vision problems. I knew that something needed to change.
Despite our susceptibility to the false message of the good life paraded in front of our spiritual eyes, deep down we sense a fracture in our imagination. We know that something needs to change. We also know that it will take more than incantations or a vague hope to bring about this change. What we need are more than sentimental wishes and a saccharine love. What we need is real, life-changing transformation.
Lasting transformation does not grow out of fear. Nor does it come about by sheer willpower. Those soils are too shallow for strong roots to take hold. We need thicker loam in which to plant the seeds of change. So how does lasting transformation happen? It begins by seeing an alternative to the current state of things. Lasting change comes not simply by moving away from something, but by moving toward a different vision. Change is only inspired by compelling possibilities. The alternative picture needs to be both attractive and plausible. A drug addict, for example, will not endure the pain of getting sober unless the alternative picture is appealing enough to inspire lasting commitment. A man will remain a workaholic, spending all his extra hours away from home, until the picture of home is attractive enough to lure him toward hearth and home.
How does one see this alternative picture that is not currently before the eyes unless it be by the imagination? Only the imagination can see what is not before the eyes. Only the imagination can generate possibilities or envision alternatives. If the alternative story or picture that I envision in my imagination is both convincing and compelling enough to adjust my actions, then change takes place. An unhealthy imagination has no strength to see alternatives or it chases the wrong alternatives.
Personal and relational healing will only come by such transformation and this is how the imagination will save humanity: it is the vehicle for real and lasting change. Real transformation occurs when we identify the right, desirable picture of the good life and realize that our current reality does not coincide with that picture. When the right picture of the good life is vivid enough and beautiful enough in our imagination to compel change, then we are motivated to adjust our choices accordingly.
For this reason, Romans 12:2 tells us to “not be conformed to this world: but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The Greek word for mind in this case, nous, might be translated “the mind’s eye,” the perception and determining faculty of the mind. Since the imagination sees what is not presently before the eyes, interprets life, and constructs a meaningful story out of experience, it is precisely the faculty addressed in Romans. If the imagination is transformed, then we are transformed. If the imagination is healthy, then we are healthy.
My boyhood visual fracture occurred by way of an assault on normalcy: crisis. God gave me twenty-twenty vision before that, but crisis changes everything. Crisis, brokenness, distorted my vision and provoked change. Everything I looked at was skewed, dizzying, and doubled. My days were characterized by pain, by fracture, and by disjunction. Sin has caused the same breakage in our lives. Crises provoke us to imagine an alternative. Even as a boy, I knew that I could not live the rest of my life with such severe vision problems. I knew that something needed to change. We know that something needs to change. What we need is real, life altering transformation. What we need is the ability to see as God sees, to imagine as God imagines.
I went under the knife: a procedure that was rarely done with any effect at the time. The doctor said he had performed that surgery only twice before and neither patient had regained full sight. The situation demanded prayer. A flash notice went out to everyone I knew and everyone I didn’t know. People got up in the middle of the night to pray for me before and after the doctor made an incision among the folds of skin beneath my eye. He peeled back the skin and separated the plates of my facial bone so that he could release the trapped muscles, then stitched me back together.
I wore a patch over my eye for some time afterward: light was harmful and healing was at a fragile point of flux. Within only a few months of the surgery, I was miraculously restored to full health. We could not explain it except by way of miracle. The prayers of the righteous availeth much.
We need change. We want change. The means to lasting change is found not by doing something differently or thinking differently, but seeing with new eyes. Nothing short of a miracle will give us that vision. If we want a miracle, we need to pray for one. We need a healthy imagination that sees what is not directly before our eyes; an imagination aligned with God’s imagination, so let us pray for new eyes.
