Scripture makes it clear that our life fractures can only be healed by way of forgiveness. Divine forgiveness is our means to abundant life. We’ve also realized that lasting transformation comes only by way of fixing our imaginative vision on God. Finally, God can only be seen with the Holy Spirit in the eyes and through the imaginative virtues: faith, hope, and love.
Meaningful transformation is a matter of aligning our imagination with God’s imagination, by aligning our desires with God’s desires. An aligned, well-directed love forms us while a misdirected love deforms us. Any life transformation we desire will come only by way of Christ’s forgiveness, and forgiveness inspires the pursuit of imaginative virtues.
The unfortunate fact is that we want change the easy way. We toss effort after foolishness when we think that transformation will come cheaply in the form of an attitude adjustment, plastic surgery, a new lover, or a different cell phone. How easily we choose bizarre and futile means to change.
Imagine this:
I was eight years old or so. Kenya was home by now. I swung and swooped in the tropical air with the ease of a swallow. Barefooted, I wandered footpaths for miles. Already, I spoke Swahili fluidly and bantered with my friends like it was my mother tongue. They stopped running their hands through my mzungu hair, but I could see that I was a white blotch on a sea of beautiful black.
My parents attended a conference in a far off city and so they shuffled me off to stay with my best friend. Philip’s family was larger than my own and stuffed into a small concrete house. On the first evening, I approached the dreaded time when I would have to strip down and change into my pajamas. I didn’t mind that the children shared a couple of old mattresses on the floor in a back room. Exposing my naked white butt, however, that I did mind. I minded very much, but privacy was a rich man’s privilege. Aunty Christine, Philip’s mother, told me that we were all made by God and that I needed to get over myself. I dawdled for awhile until the other children finished changing. Some remained in the room, but they seemed distracted so I cautiously took my shirt off and pulled off my pants. I was totally in the buck when my friend turned around and choked on his own laughter. The stifled giggles burst into outright guffaws.
I can’t blame him. Standing there exposed, I felt the weight of strangeness press down on my heart. My nakedness, I felt, was a double nakedness: first, because I had no clothes and second, because I was bleached white like a sheet. My pajamas quickly hid me, of course.
I noodled on a question all that night: “Why would God make me so strange, so doubly naked?” I could imagine no reason why God would do such a thing. Perhaps I was a cosmic mistake; at least I was sure that the pigment of my skin was a cosmic mistake. Perhaps I was a glitch in creation, neglected and planted in a world more beautiful than myself. Surely God would not do such a thing on purpose!
The next day I wandered outside and stared at a large pile of cooking charcoal. An idea struck my young brain and I imagined an alternative to the current state of things. Change was possible! Transformation was within reach! So I reached out my hand and took some charcoal. I rubbed it angrily on my arm. The charcoal was abrasive and severe to my child’s skin, but it made my skin darker. The rewards were worth the cost of pain, so I kept rubbing the charcoal. I was giddy with the excitement of self-transformation. Possibility rose up before my eyes and I furtively glanced about. No one was around, so I stripped down again—all the way down.
By the time Moses arrived, I was well on my way to full transformation. Moses was Philip’s father, a generous and gregarious man, but he might as well have been the first Moses come down from Mt. Sinai to me in that moment. I was Israel cavorting before the golden calf and I froze mid-caper. Thankfully, he didn’t have any stone tablets. He only smirked and called me to himself. I dropped the charcoal, pulled on my clothes in disappointment and shuffled over.
“What are you doing?” asked Moses quietly.
“Making changes,” I muttered.
“Who do you belong to?” he asked.
I groused and folded my arms.
“Who do you belong to?” he asked again.
“God?” I theorized.
“That’s right. Does God know what he is doing?”
I felt cornered. Moses was black and wonderful. How did he know?! I knew the right answer to his question, but I still wrestled with some apparent inconsistencies. If God knew what he was doing, then why was I Caucasian? I groused again and unfolded my arms. They fell limply to my sides.
“Yes, Ben. God knows what he is doing. Your skin is exactly what God intended from the beginning. It is not a mistake and you make a very big mistake trying to change God’s plans.”
I vaguely remember Moses helping me clean off, saving me the indignity of the neighbor kids seeing me half-transformed, half way through metamorphosis. I remain thankful for that encounter to this day, though I did not willingly accept his theological case until I was much older. I certainly look back on this anecdote in my life with all the advantages of age and perspective, but it still serves as a fitting illustration of how and what we try to change. Sometimes we recognize what really needs to change, but choose all the wrong ways to change it. On the other hand, sometimes we try to change the very things that God has given to us as gifts.
I was teaching my students about Lord Byron once. They were impressed by the apparent contradiction between his beautiful poetry and his broken life. His ambition and idolization of the Don Juan lifestyle ran so contrary to his more cogent poems. One student who had recently passed through some serious health issues spoke up and said, “How unfortunate that Byron would miss the very means God provided for divine communion.”
“What do you mean by that?” asked another student.
“Well, it just seems that Byron did everything in his power to overcome the clubbed foot he had since birth.”
“Who wouldn’t?” responded another student.
“It seems logical enough,” responded this young man, “but what if the clubbed foot was the gateway to dependence upon and communion with God?”
“Then he’s trying to change all the wrong things,” said the other students.
If we align our imagination, our spiritual vision, with God’s vision, then we will more likely see the right things to change and the right means to change them. We will also see that all effort toward transformation by way of behavioral changes or environmental changes or attitude changes is wasted. We may temporarily change our actions, but change is a matter of will in that case. The will does not have the strength to hold unless it responds to a better picture or a better story. A change in thinking is no better. A change in information is often helpful and required. It often inspires change, but will not serve the larger purpose unless the data provides my imagination with an alternative picture or story that compels deeper change.
Proverbs provides ample examples of this means toward change. The father educates his son about the dangers of sex outside the marriage covenant by providing word pictures. “Let me show you a picture of what will happen if you follow the immoral woman, son,” says the father. “On the other hand, let me give you a picture of what will happen if you choose the safe path.” The father spends most of the book talking in word pictures so that he can captivate the son’s imagination and provoke moral change or better secure virtue. He says to his son, “my son, pay attention to my wisdom; lend your ear to my understanding, that you may preserve discretion and your lips may keep knowledge. For the lips of an immoral woman drip honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil; but in the end she is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death, her steps lay hold of hell. Lest you ponder her path of life—her ways are unstable; you do not know them” (Proverbs 5:1-6).
Here’s another example: many of us say that we love Christ and his Church, but all our actions point to a different picture of the good life. We may echo the psalmist’s longing that “better is a day in God’s courts than a thousand elsewhere,” but we spend all our days and energies at the stadium and the mall and wandering the virtual hallways of social networking. Like the son in the book of Proverbs, we are motivated to avoid one image in favor of another image and this is the principle of imaginative change. What I most deeply consider the picture of the good life is what drives my actions. We will only find lasting transformation when our vision aligns with God’s vision of the good life: a vision rooted in faith, hope, and love.
Real transformation will happen when we see faith, hope, and love as part of a larger narrative and when we pursue faith, hope, and love with all the attentiveness of a boy in front of his presents on Christmas morning. Faith is a gift. Hope is a gift. Love is a gift. Transformation comes by way of gifts and desiring not only the gift, but the gift Giver.
