Russel Conwell, in his famous lecture Acres of Diamonds, describes our spiritual inattention very well. It seems a young man in Pennsylvania owned a farm many years ago and wanted to sell it. He tried to secure a job collecting coal oil in Canada for his cousin before selling the farm. His cousin refused until the farmer knew more about the oil business.
“Well, then I will know all there is to know.” And immediately he commenced studying the whole subject beginning with God’s creation until he knew the business inside and out. He understood pumping and refining and finally wrote his cousin to prove this depth of knowledge. His cousin invited him to join the company and so the farmer sold his farm for 833 dollars.
The new owner of the farm went out to water the cattle and found a plank thrown into the brook that ran behind the barn. The plank’s purpose was to send a dark sludge over to the opposite bank so that the cattle would not put their noses into it when drinking. The man who went to Canada had been damming for twenty-three years a flood of coal oil worth a hundred million dollars at the time. Some years later, state geologists declared the find worth a thousand million dollars at the time of Conwell’s lecture.
Many of us live like that poor farmer. Blindly, unimaginatively, we overlook what God places before us. He reveals his fingerprint in his timing, yes, but we must live attentively so that our spiritual vision might be anointed more and more with the Holy Spirit.
Second, the imagination restlessly sees what is not presently before the eyes. It recalls the past, it anticipates the future, and it interprets the present. This is where we can do more to sanctify the imagination. While it is true that only God can transform the imagination, just as only God can transform our life stories, he uses means to do so. The means by which he shapes us are myriad, but there are three that particularly impact the imagination: prayer, people, and perspective. Our imaginations become more aligned with God’s when we pray imaginatively, when we walk with fellow pilgrims whose imaginations are pointed in the right direction and who can perform surgery on our imagination, and when we look at life from a more eternal or spiritual perspective.
Finally, I think one of the most helpful things we can do to sanctify the imagination is to foster in ourselves a serious case of spiritual discontentment. Loitering or aimless wandering are unacceptable to the pilgrim intent on reaching a destination. A pilgrim is perpetually discontent, unsatisfied, until that destination is reached and we should embrace this brand of discontent. Paul tells us to learn contentment as he learned contentment, but he was not against all forms of discontent. Indeed, Paul expressed his discontent when he said, “I press on to reach the goal so that I might win the eternal prize that is set before me” (Phil. 3:14). How do we foster this good discontent? How do we press on and fix our eyes on the destination of our pilgrimage? At least one way we press on is by assessing our stories and our imaginative vision. If we really want every aspect of our lives to fall under the Lordship of Christ, including this formative gift called the imagination, then we must ask ourselves some guiding questions that prompt self-assessment. These questions fall under four categories: parable, pilgrimage, people, and principles.
The first question we can ask ourselves is, “What kind of parable is my life story?” We are the epiphany of God, the spoken stories of God. We are his parables. The question remains whether our parable teaches others a lesson of faith, hope, and love or whether it teaches others a lesson of the self-life.
The second question we might ask is, “Am I living like a pilgrim?” Christians are pilgrims, but many of us refuse to embrace the pilgrim’s ways. We would much rather live like we are home than live like we are aliens. A pilgrim has an entirely different mindset, trajectory, and equipment. His mindset is as one who is homesick. He sees a glimpse of home wherever he can, but refuses to trade temporary sweetness for eternal satisfaction. His trajectory is always away from self, away from the tin of this world, and toward the eternal garden-city of Paradise. The pilgrim presses toward the calling voice of God. What is the pilgrim’s equipment? Very little is needed for a pilgrimage. Food, water, and a compass is all one needs because a pilgrim always travels light. Scripture is our food, the book we are to eat (Rev. 10:9), Christ is the living water (John 4:10), and our compass is Truth (Psalm 86:11).
The third question to ask ourselves is, “What kind of people are shaping my story?” Bunyan’s Christian, in Pilgrim’s Progress, met many fellow travelers along the way. Some waylaid him, others jilted him, and several led him astray. But Christian had some traveling companions who kept him pointed to his ultimate destination. We are like Christian, we are like Pinocchio, in that we must choose our traveling companions. The judgments we make here often define the rest of our pilgrimage. We waylay ourselves and jilt our own souls when we choose the wrong friends.
The final question to ask is, “What principles guide my actions?” Vaguely moralistic principles will not do because they lack backbone and our fractures deserve much more than spineless attention. The principles with spine are imaginative principles based on the imaginative virtues—Faith, Hope, and Love. We find those principles expressed in many different ways in the Scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, but we also find them expressed in the shadows and derivatives of the Christ. Shadows of Christ are those stories of antiquity that predate Christ and, very often, point forward to him. The Greek mythology and tragedies, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, to name only a few, are shadows of the myth come true: God put on flesh and blood to save his people. Derivatives of the Scriptures are those books, movies, and music that point back to Christ in some way. Examples abound, but the works of Walter Wangerin, Jr., the works of Dostoyevsky, and of Tolkien to name only a few, give us incarnations of Christ. These expressions of Christ are only derivatives of Christ himself, of course, and so pilgrims must remember that our aim is Christ, not the derivatives. Nonetheless, we can find in these examples, imaginative tools that inform our Faith, renew our Hope, and energize our Love.
Still, any real life application that brings about lasting change is painful. Only the Lion of Judah can change us and he seems to prefer painful methods for transformation. Our bones must be re-broken to be reset. Only God can remake the spiritual feet that we have bound; it is not a change we can self-will.
Our situation is even more dire than that. We are dead in our sins says Colossians 2:13. Still, we are given new birth, not through our own re-birthing, but through Christ (Ephesians 2:5). For this reason, we are mendicants, beggars, waiting on God to transform our lives during our pilgrimage. All we can do is ask for more faith, nourish our feeble hope, and love what God loves. He has set us on our way, and he shall surely bring us to our destination, so we can only wait and trust him to heal our bound and broken feet.
With Job, we cry, “All the days of my struggle, I wait for my change to come” (Job 14:14).
