Re-Imagining

It's fun sometimes to dream of different things.  To get creative about different ways of imagining the world.  In our natural minds, we can only imagine the world in the ways that it has been modeled for us.  We feed off the examples in our past to determine how we look at the world.  It's very difficult to step outside of them!  You can see exactly where my spiritual life comes from by examining about a half dozen examples in my past.  You can understand my professional life by the same process.  The way I handle my money.  The purchases I make.  We, as social humans, get a lot of how we operate from seeing how others operate.  If it works for them, it must work for me too.  This is all well and good until one of two things happen: what if our examples aren't accurate, or what if all our examples agree?

Teresa of Avila

What if they aren't accurate?  Examples of commonly-accepted though well-rebutted groupthink are too numerous to mention here.  Recently I posted here about re-reading the Bible and suddenly having my eyes opened to different realities.  For the past couple of months I've really been asking a lot of questions about my life, because in some ways I wonder if the examples that have been set for me of spiritual life are accurate.  I see the same things examining the lives of remarkable spiritual leaders throughout history.  Some people just seemed to see the world completely differently, and live their lives in a totally different way.  What if I struggle to pray because I haven't seen an example of someone who gets it right, the way the Bible describes it?  It's not just spiritual things - maybe I organize my time because my society has shown me that productivity is the key to value.  What if that's just plain wrong - if my life would be more fulfilling and more significant to others if I sat at my desk less, neglected more "important" duties, and spent more time building community?

Pakistani Savings Group

Or what if all our examples agree with each other?  Wouldn't that cause us to stagnate, to get stuck?  Nearly every restaurant, when asked for vegetables, provides either a salad (of 1-2 types of greens) or a couple basic veggies in a bowl.  They, and the canning industry, have led us to believe that God's good earth only has about a dozen types of vegetables.  Or, if everybody I know says the way to be sustainable in retirement is to save 10% of your income every year in a well-diversified portfolio, wouldn't I assume that's the only way?  What if there were another way, one based on a community of generosity where people and family members owe so many financial debts to each other that they stop keeping track of them and just take care of each other?  In America, it's assumed that every adult needs their own car and if a place isn't on a road it's not accessible.  Why?  What if cities spent as much money on public transportation as they do on roads, and drastically decreased the number of highways?  Why can't that be a possibility?  I'm convinced that by expanding our horizons of examples and influences, we can unlock other potential scenarios.  We could see through the fallacy that there is one clear path through life, and discover great things.

Just give me this sunset
and I'm at peace.

This past summer, Katie and I spent twelve weeks in South America.  Sometimes I still struggle to know why exactly we did that, if I'm honest.  It was valuable for a variety of reasons, to be sure.  We felt God clearly leading us to do it, so we did.  One of the benefits was that we were presented with different realities and imagined life in different ways.  In one it was the rainforest, where muddy paths, daily rains, unreliable electricity, and no running water were the norm.  In another it was the desert, where you did a lot of walking, riding buses, and drying clothes on the roof and where the food was amazingly simple yet satisfying.  You avoided throwing anything in the trash because you had seen the city dump where it would end up.  We struggled in South America, but I think that subconsciously once returning we realized that we had felt a surprising sense of living when we were there.  The community was very refreshing.  It was amazing how clean our bodies felt eating simple foods.  Living with our few possessions was easy.

Sometimes culture tends to tell us a certain thing, and it's surprisingly hard to imagine things a different way.  I'm convinced, however, that there are beautiful worlds out there waiting for us to discover them if we can just stop to re-imagine, from the ground up, a different way of approaching life.  Don't just accept as true what people tell you, be grateful that it works for them and consider for yourself whether it's the only way.