Imagination and Hearing God

I’m discovering that meditation is the most powerful way to hear God. Actually, “powerful” isn’t a strong enough word. Meditation may be the most profound, deep, life-changing, heart-enriching way to hear God I’ve ever experienced.

 But there is a problem. I picture meditation—maybe you do too— as something kind of weird. It’s someone dressed in leotards, sitting in an awkward position, humming nonsensical syllables, emptying the mind, and thinking of “one hand clapping.” It’s the mystic monk escaping the world. It seems totally disconnected from real life.

But everyone is a meditation expert. We meditate all the time. We don’t know it because we call it something else, and we slip into it accidentally.

Transforming our everyday meditations into prayerful imagination will change your life.

We’re all experts

Every day, every breathing human soul imagines, the business tycoon and the homeless person, the New York poet and the Himalayan shepherd. Everyone invents in the mind.

We paint mental pictures of what life would be like, “If…,” or what we’ll do, “When….” We think, “If only she would date me and we’d get married.” Or, “If I lost forty pounds, how much more fun would I have?” And, “What if I won the Lottery?”

In our spare minutes, standing in an elevator or waiting for the cashier, scattered moments throughout the day, we imagine.

Our mental picture painting is a type of meditation. It is a concentrated thinking on a particular subject. It’s seeing our lives differently in our mind’s eye.

It creates Intimacy

The best imagining is shared, it’s brainstorming with a friend. Fiancés picture life after marriage; tired spouses dream of a vacation by the sea; software developers envision creating the next best selling iPad App. We love to share our mind’s eye with someone else; it connects our hearts through shared inner images.

Imagining together creates intimacy.

It’s also possible to share our imagination while talking with God. God shares an image (passage, story, truth) with us, and we share our hearts’ desires with God. We connect our hearts to God in this prayerful, conversational brainstorming.

It creates intimacy with God, sharing our heart, our deepest dreams.

It fuels longing

Learning to meditate isn’t difficult; our problem isn’t meditation per se; our problem is the subject we choose for concentrated thinking. Repeated imagining increases longing. That’s why pornography is so addictive. Paul wrote, “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life” (Rom. 8:6).

Intentional imagining is the most powerful way we “set our mind” on something. Sustained visualization of earthly things—a new car, a new dress, a job promotion, sex without commitment—increases our desires for those things. But it never brings real life.

Even a momentary satisfaction of these earth-bound desires always fails satisfy the deepest longings of the heart.

Setting our minds on—and this includes intentional imagining of—spiritual things increases our longing for them, such as, picturing life as God’s chosen child, envisioning life with a parent who is the Master of the Universe, have a long conversation about your life with the Almighty, and personally hearing God’s voice.

These bring deep, soul satisfaction, as our imaginations touch the face of God.

So how can we set our minds on the Spirit?

It’s easy to slip into conjuring pictures of worldly solutions; we have so many external pressures. Those stresses spark our minds to visualize solutions. We just worked a long week, so we picture a movie in the theater; our rusted car breaks down (for the third time this month), and we dream of a new (or new-ish) trouble-free Jeep.

This-world’s external pressures choose meditation topics for us.

In Christian meditation, we let God choose the topic. Pick a passage (maybe the one that most recently stirred something in you) and simply talk—brainstorm if you will—with God. Intentionally think on (and make pictures of) his words through deliberate imagining. Here are some possible passages:

• “Consider [imagine, meditate on] how wild flowers grow. They neither labor nor spin. Yet I tell you, even Solomon with all his splendor was not dressed like one of these” (Luke 12:27).
• “The kingdom of heaven is like merchant [Jesus] seeking fine pearls. When he found that one pearl of incredible value [you], he went and sold all that he had and bought it” (Matthew 13:45-46).
• “O God, my God; I eagerly seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry, weary land where there is no water. So I gaze upon you [imagine, meditate] … and my soul is satisfied as with a great feast (Psalm 63).

We focus our minds on the Spirit as we let these word pictures fill our imagination. Consider these passages—imagine yourself and God in them—picture them prayerfully in conversation with God, and God will speak exactly what you need to hear in your heart.

We let God pick the topic and we simply soak in his words. A conversational life of brainstorming with God—hearing him speak daily—seems unimaginably good. But the intimacy with us is God’s desire.

Imagine that.

Sam