Thursday, October 16, 2008

Just Imagine

I was going to write a post. It was going to be good. But when my fingers hit the keyboard, all the words that came out were mediocre. I couldn’t think of a way to convey my thoughts in a non-boring way. I considered posting anyway, hoping that someone would be willing to wade through the dryness to find my meaning, but that wouldn’t be right.

Not long afterwards, I read some words of John Piper on the subject of imagination: “…when a person speaks or writes or sings or paints about breathtaking truth in a boring way, it is probably a sin.”

What? Probably a sin? That doesn't make sense--unless we think of imagination as a God given tool to proclaim His glory. Piper continued: “The supremacy of God in the life of the mind is not honored when God and His amazing world are observed truly, analyzed duly and communicated boringly. Imagination is the key to killing boredom.

“Don’t mistake what I’m saying. Poets and painters and preachers don’t make God’s beauty more beautiful. They make it more visible. They cut through the dull fog of our finite, fallible, sin-distorted perception, and help us see God’s beauty for what it really is. Imagination is like a telescope to the stars: It doesn’t make them big. They are big without the telescope. It makes them look like what they are.” (Piper, John. Life is a Vapor.)

There is some good, meaty truth in that. As a speech coach, often I tell students to speak with more energy. “If you’re not speaking with energy and if your face is only expressing boredom, your audience isn’t going to care what you have to say.” Not to mention that if you’re unable to explain something with energy to an audience, you probably don’t care much about it yourself.

Long story short, I'm going to keep working on my other post.