I love this song because Lanae Hale uses her IMAGINATION! She is Peter running on water in the darkness trying to reach Jesus. Have you ever looked down into water from a bridge at night? It looks like an abyss of nothingness (Yes, I did go bridge jumping with my youth group in high school one cold February night. Shhhhhh . . .don’t tell anyone 
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So Lanae is running on water in the middle of the night and the waves are crashing against her. The roar of the wind is all around her; but she knows that if she could just reach Jesus, she’ll be safe from the storm! Can you just imagine that and relate it to your life today?! The imagination is an awesome thing! It helps us to meditate on God and His Word. It helps us to get our faith from our heads to our hearts!
Just today I read in John Piper’s book “Life as a Vapor” that “One of the great duties of the Christian mind is imagination.” This is so affirming to me because Piper is one of those intellectual Christians (I mean this in the best sense). I’m currently reading four of his books — I started them over two years ago — and they are like lean meat: you can only take a few bites then it takes about a month to chew and digest them.
The fact that Piper places so much emphasis on the imagination is very cool because the imagination has such a bad reputation. Many of us think the imagination is for creative, yet ditsy people or for new-age people who seem to make up the purpose of life as they go. Yet, here is a Ph.D. college professor turned pastor who firmly believes that the imagination is necessary for Christians! Wahoo!!! The imagination is awesome!
Though there are many uses for the imagination in all sorts of fields (science, sports, therapy, etc.), I want to highlight its use in meditation. Meditation is extremely Biblical. Just go to Bible Gateway or Blue Letter Bible and type in “meditate.” You will get a ginormous list of verses! Meditation is used to fill our minds with God and His Word; It is not used to empty our minds into some sort of empty, blissful state.
When we meditate, we can ponder scripture, which means we mull it over in our minds until the Holy Spirit can get understanding through our dense and cluttered brains. We can memorize scripture, which works best when a verse jumps up and hits you! Or — my favorite — we can use our imaginations to understand the stories in the Bible better and God’s character better.
We can imagine Jesus is sitting there next to us while we pray (which He is). We can imagine that the world around us disintegrates and we are at the foot of God’s throne (which we are). We can draw or paint a picture of truths that we have discovered in the Bible (I did this with the Tree of Life — I’ll have to show you sometime). We can take a story from the Bible and play it out in today’s time (e.g. Instead of Jesus dying on a cross, we can imagine Him dying in an electric chair or by lethal injection). Or we can imagine that we are there in the story, which is what Lanae does in her song.
The imaginations adds emotion and depth to the Bible and God and gives us a viewpoint that we would never have if we just read it. There are a lot of Christians with a head full of knowledge, but we want to be Christians with hearts changed for God. Try it out. I think you’ll enjoy it. I wish more Christians were wearing their yoga style pants, smelling their rooms up with incense, carrying their grass mats into their closets and meditating on Scripture and God. We would shock the free world!
In order to show my love of God’s gift of the imagination, I will be compiling a list of imagination quotes from the published writings of Christ followers. And I need your help! When you are reading your Christian books, articles, journals, lyrics, etc. and you run across a quote about the imagination, send it my way. Make sure the writer is a Christian and not just a pretty sounding false prophet. I don’t care how spectacular a false prophet’s writing is. If I don’t see JESUS, I ain’t (and I say “AIN’T”) reading it!
If you find a gem or write a gem, send it to me and I’ll give you credit! I would liked Faith Imagined to be the leading web site with the MOST imagination quotes written by Christians!
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