Limits of Our Imagination
I sometimes use Google Earth in classes to help students visualize another part of our planet. We’re learning about countries in Asia right now, so we use the street view to drop down on the other side of the world. We explore palaces and city streets, amusement parks and museums. I love seeing their faces when a scene zooms in and then comes into focus. It’s like a little bit of technological magic.
But do you know the first thing they all want to do as soon as they figure out what the technology is capable of? They want to see their own house. Almost without fail, they want to put in their own address and see the same door that they walked out of 3 hours earlier.
Given virtual access to the entire world, they want to see the spot where the bus picks them up each morning. They want to see their cars, their grass, their basketball hoops.
Why?
Why, when given the chance to see something completely new, something we will probably never stumble upon by accident, do we want to look at something we’ve seen a thousand times before?
It seems to be a very human instinct. You could think of it as self-centeredness. We might assume kids only think about themselves. But I saw something else in this impulse– a desire to feel seen. To see their home as it looks to a stranger is to know that their existence matters on a scale bigger than the daily drudgery and drama of school and family. To feel significant in a world that is sometimes too big.
I feel it too. The dueling impulses– to see and to be seen. To experience everything in the world, but also to be known for something. Anything, really. To be recognized as someone who makes a difference.
The feelings aren’t wrong. Everyone wants to be known. To be seen in a crowd and have someone say, “There she is.”
But we can become so concerned with how we’re being portrayed in the story that we lose the thread. We forget that we can see the whole world and we keep coming back to our front doors.
I recently prayed that I wouldn’t limit God by the limits of my imagination. Because I see in myself a tendency to keep my attention on my front porch. And if I will only follow God somewhere that I can picture for myself, then I’ll keep coming back to the same, familiar address. Completely unaware of what God might have prepared for me a few miles outside of the neighborhood of my experiences.
To give God control over and above what we can imagine for ourselves is a prayer that should be equal parts exhausting and exhilarating. What we might be asked to do could be the hardest thing we’ve ever done. It might cost us more than we thought we could give up. But it will also be better than anything we could dream up for ourselves. Because the world outside of my front door is infinitely more complex and beautiful and confusing and dangerous and wonderful than any of us can really imagine.
Now to Him who is able to do infinitely more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at work within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. (Ephesians 3: 20-21)
