Preparation as Imagination

This Advent season is full of talk about preparations. So, for what are you preparing? For what are you spending these 32 days making ready?

We 21st century journeyers struggle with the unknown, with just leaving things to chance, with admitting that perhaps there are those aspects of our journey that are not for us to know now. That is what Advent does for us...it points us toward mystery. Some would equate that to nothingness or, perhaps, even to darkness--unknown, foreboding, maybe even a little dangerous. But God came and comes over and over again. I think that God's coming does not, much to some of our chagrin, bring with it the surety that we might like. God's coming instead opens the door to our imagination.

God says...walk with me awhile my child and look...look far beyond where you can see...listen far beyond where you can hear...journey far beyond where you think belong...and there, there I will be, and there will be the Creation that I have created for you. Imagination is not some childhood phenonemon that we are meant to lose as we mature. It is part of us and it mature with us. A mature imagination has no limits to what it can envision; it has no boundaries to what it can do. A mature imagination steps beyond reason and intellect, not leaving them behind, but sweeping them up into a new image, a new Creation, the place to which God leads us. Envision it...and then as you are preparing to meet the Christ child once again, imagine what that new world looks like and begin sowing the seeds that it hands you. For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations. (Isaiah 61:11)

So go forth and imagine!

Grace and Peace,

Shelli