Tip of My Iceberg

With Halloween coming, people are putting up monstrous decorations, emphasis on monstrous. We’re seeing ghouls, goblins, and ghosts in surrounding neighborhoods. The amount of effort put into this boggles my mind–I’m not into scary stuff.

My daughter Courtney bought what she believed was a life-sized skeleton for decorating their home in Denver. She and her family are all about celebrating well, whatever the holiday. So imagine her chagrin when what she received was a three-foot-tall skeleton, too tiny to really meet the needs of intended decorating.

Not for Beck, her six-year-old son. He was delighted with the bony little guy and immediately made him his new friend. He named him Jeremy.

What I’ve always appreciated about Beck is his amazing imagination, which now has embraced a pile of bones as a friend. It’s not weird or unusual; he just sees the potential for playing make-believe with something not quite human. The best part was when he invited Jeremy for dinner.

Jeremy didn’t eat much, but he did catch on to lounging quite rapidly.

Screens, video games, and AI have cramped our ability to imagine. We don’t have to work through dreams anymore; AI can craft it quicker than you can think it. Yet our imaginations fuel deeper concepts, create ideas that may at one time have sounded preposterous, and help us see hope when life feels monochromatic.

The famous scientist Albert Einstein, who himself was greatly misunderstood growing up, said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world.” The artist/scholar Leonardo da Vinci reminds us, “What is now proved was once only imagined.”

Imagination is at the very heart of who God is. He called the world into being, creating what had never been by His power and producing a world for us to live and thrive in. C.S. Lewis describes it fancifully in his book, “The Magician’s Nephew”.

“In the darkness, something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away….Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once….Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth itself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard….One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leapt out–single stars, constellations, and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world….The Lion was pacing to and fro about that empty land and singing his new song….And as he walked and sang, the valley grew green with grass….Soon there were other things besides grass….’Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak.’”

God spoke the world and all that’s in it into existence. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1. For six days, He spoke into being every celestial body, every sea and ocean, every land mass, every plant and animal, and finally man; all of which he created out of nothing.

Beck uses his imagination to make a friend out of a bunch of bones. God used His imagination to create everything we know and love, calling all into life from nothing.

We understand the basic structure of the human body, which is grounded in a skeletal system that is foundational to our bodies’ being able to do what they do.

God called into being all the bare bones of life itself as a gift to us. He filled in all the blanks with color, creativity, and compassion. All in love.

Beck’s buddy, Jeremy, is fun, but not all there.

What God has given us is all we need for fullness of life.

No bones about it.