Brian Aldiss suggests that children remind us of our decay. There was once a time when we dreamed long dreams and hoped large hopes, imagining remarkable possibilities for our life stories. We used to dream of walking with kings until our sin, failure, and cowardice pressed us down into the cellar of our own hopelessness.

Sometimes, sometimes we dream those dreams again. Sometimes we hope those hopes. It is in this way, that the imagination tries to break out of that cellar before the realist inside beats those dreams down, reminding us why we are in that cellar in the first place. It recalls to us the myriad dangers lurking in those open spaces. Why? Because the power of sin, failure, and cowardice does more than alienate us from God, it erodes our dreams and decays our joy.

What’s the solution?

Ephesians 3:20 is a much needed jetpack:

“Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or imagine, according to the power that worketh in us.”

If we wake up every morning with this verse strapped to our backs, then we can power out of the cellar and live the day more hopeful, more optimistic, and pursue bigger, more generous dreams. We could never out-dream God and that’s a child-like vision for life.

Christ’s death restored that child-like thinking to us.

Heraclitus once said, “Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.”

We’ve assumed that a child’s imagination is limited to childhood, but that assumption is unbiblical and sad. A “realistic” adult is one who has consigned his vision to the narrow confines of a cellar. His hopes, if he has any, are small and they stink like sniveling wishes. He demands we forget that Christ is loose and at large. He sneers at miracles or explains them away. And I don’t mean that he sneers only at miracles in Scripture, he does so even with the small and large miracles of our day to day.

How many of us have become this man? How many of us avoid eye-contact with failure or refuse to confront our cowardice. How many of us give our sin to Christ with one hand while snatching it back with the other?

We smell the cellar and feel its cold pressure. We want out, but we’re too afraid of the possibilities of living under an open sky. We’ve grown comfortable with our familiar confines. Maybe it’s time we nurtured a childlike imagination.

As the man once said, “You will find more happiness growing down than up.”
Amen to that.