post started 2/2013 but seems particularly poignant and necessary in my current context:
One of the more significant themes of which God has been reminding me lately has been the idea of dreaming - dreaming for myself, for my patients, God's dreaming for the people I encounter and His dreaming for me. God is calling me to what Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggeman would call "the prophetic imagination" - the ability of the Old Testament prophets to imagine a different reality than the one they saw and to call people to live that alternate reality rather than the one shaped by the surrounding culture that took for granted the existence of injustice, inequality, and idolatry. Brueggeman says that this prophetic imagination is to be a "practice that is undertaken by real believers who share the conviction of grief and hope that escapes" the cultural expectations. As I have read several articles recently about lament, I think it is important that this imagination and my dreaming involve both grief and hope as we first recognize the shortcomings but then second realize that the shortcomings themselves make room for dreaming.
It is easy not to dream, easy to get stuck in grief. It is easy to give up on the possibility that people's lives - my life, for that matter - could be different. It's easy to feel that this person's addiction or that person's eating and exercise habits or this one's anxiety, depression, and somaticization are things that are immutable, that the energy to effect change would amount to an unscalable mountain.
The invitation to dream is an invitation to believe instead that anything is possible. It's an invitation to continue grieving when things are wrong because they are wrong. This world is not yet as it should be, not yet as it will be. But it's also an invitation to hope that the things that are wrong can be and will be made right.
In order to hope in right and in order to recognize what is wrong, we need to know what is right. We need to remember what we and others were made for. How do we do this? In The Message, John 3 says, "It is necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted up - and everyone who looks up to him, trusting and expectant, will gain a real life, eternal life." I am reminded that the life of God is real life, life that lasts, life that reflects true reality.
John goes on to explain, "God-light streamed into the world, but men and women everywhere ran for the darkness. They went for the darkness because they were not really interested in pleasing God...addicted to denial and illusion...But anyone working and living in truth and reality welcomes God-light so the work can be seen for the God-work it is." I see this in my patients so often. I see this in myself so often. We run (what an image!) from the hard choices that walk us into the light, preferring our addictions, preferring our known darkness in denial and illusion, to the adjustmentsand even initial pain of walking into and in the light.
God calls us to work and live in truth and reality. He calls us to do God-work and to welcome God-light. How would my life look different if I see it in the light, in the open and vulnerable spaces where both grace and truth cast light on who I am, beloved and needy, by turns rebellious and forgiven? How would my patients' lives look different if they were part of God-work, God-reality? Can I even imagine it? How would I see them differently without the shadows that enshroud who they are and are meant to be, with lives that were open and full of God-light?
My call from God to dream is simple but hard. It involves sitting for a few minutes as I close notes at the end of the day and asking God to show me something beyond the despair and patterns and habits that I see day in and day out in myself and others. It involves asking God to show me His dreams for his children, the images of wholeness and transformation and redemption that go beyond my limited imagination but are held within the boundless expanses of his. It involves moving from letting the guarded wariness of cynicism shape the way I see things to allowing the tenuous frailty and surprising tenacity of hope to color the images of people that I see.
Dreaming for people means believing and living out Tim Keller's summation of the gospel: "[W]e are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared to believe, and at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope." Now that's a dream worth believing and living.
One of the more significant themes of which God has been reminding me lately has been the idea of dreaming - dreaming for myself, for my patients, God's dreaming for the people I encounter and His dreaming for me. God is calling me to what Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggeman would call "the prophetic imagination" - the ability of the Old Testament prophets to imagine a different reality than the one they saw and to call people to live that alternate reality rather than the one shaped by the surrounding culture that took for granted the existence of injustice, inequality, and idolatry. Brueggeman says that this prophetic imagination is to be a "practice that is undertaken by real believers who share the conviction of grief and hope that escapes" the cultural expectations. As I have read several articles recently about lament, I think it is important that this imagination and my dreaming involve both grief and hope as we first recognize the shortcomings but then second realize that the shortcomings themselves make room for dreaming.
It is easy not to dream, easy to get stuck in grief. It is easy to give up on the possibility that people's lives - my life, for that matter - could be different. It's easy to feel that this person's addiction or that person's eating and exercise habits or this one's anxiety, depression, and somaticization are things that are immutable, that the energy to effect change would amount to an unscalable mountain.
The invitation to dream is an invitation to believe instead that anything is possible. It's an invitation to continue grieving when things are wrong because they are wrong. This world is not yet as it should be, not yet as it will be. But it's also an invitation to hope that the things that are wrong can be and will be made right.
In order to hope in right and in order to recognize what is wrong, we need to know what is right. We need to remember what we and others were made for. How do we do this? In The Message, John 3 says, "It is necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted up - and everyone who looks up to him, trusting and expectant, will gain a real life, eternal life." I am reminded that the life of God is real life, life that lasts, life that reflects true reality.
John goes on to explain, "God-light streamed into the world, but men and women everywhere ran for the darkness. They went for the darkness because they were not really interested in pleasing God...addicted to denial and illusion...But anyone working and living in truth and reality welcomes God-light so the work can be seen for the God-work it is." I see this in my patients so often. I see this in myself so often. We run (what an image!) from the hard choices that walk us into the light, preferring our addictions, preferring our known darkness in denial and illusion, to the adjustmentsand even initial pain of walking into and in the light.
God calls us to work and live in truth and reality. He calls us to do God-work and to welcome God-light. How would my life look different if I see it in the light, in the open and vulnerable spaces where both grace and truth cast light on who I am, beloved and needy, by turns rebellious and forgiven? How would my patients' lives look different if they were part of God-work, God-reality? Can I even imagine it? How would I see them differently without the shadows that enshroud who they are and are meant to be, with lives that were open and full of God-light?
My call from God to dream is simple but hard. It involves sitting for a few minutes as I close notes at the end of the day and asking God to show me something beyond the despair and patterns and habits that I see day in and day out in myself and others. It involves asking God to show me His dreams for his children, the images of wholeness and transformation and redemption that go beyond my limited imagination but are held within the boundless expanses of his. It involves moving from letting the guarded wariness of cynicism shape the way I see things to allowing the tenuous frailty and surprising tenacity of hope to color the images of people that I see.
Dreaming for people means believing and living out Tim Keller's summation of the gospel: "[W]e are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared to believe, and at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope." Now that's a dream worth believing and living.
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