imagine

wes roberts' word in process is imagination. i have blogged on his other words, revolution and beauty, and each time have spent quite a lot of time contemplating the words. i thought i got hung up on beauty because of self image, but i think all of the words are forcing me to face issues in my life where there lack.

lack of imagination is as difficult for me as lack of beauty. so i have been avoiding writing (and even reading his posts on imagination until today). i long for this word to be associated with me, i want to be a person of great imagination. yet i find it is not necessarily always welcome. verbalizing imaginative solutions means a couple of things... 1. there is a problem, 2. the way it's being done isn't the most imaginative way and 3. the imagineer thinks they know more than those around them.

i remember the first time we met a real live imagineer. his name is c. mcnair wilson. many of you know him. i know he's a good friend of wes and judy's. mcnair is truly the most imaginative person that i know, he drips with it and he doesn't let anyone tell him it's not okay. it's written on the very core of his being, his soul, and just by being around him you can feel the rings around the planets in your brain start spinning in ways you've never dreamed of. mcnair gave liam and i permission to embrace our imaginations. he challenged us and inspired us. i love him for it, and i miss him. i could use a good shot of mcnair right about now.

we brought him into our little burg and found that there were few like us who wanted permission to be imaginative like us. that was okay. we got to spend some real quality time with mcnair, and even took him for a day to the local outdoor flea market looking for items to add to his collection. he purchased himself a trombone.

for liam and i ideas are like kleenex. oh, here's one, oh, don't like that, oh, another one just popped up, try that one, or here's a couple more... we never realized how incredibly threatening that can be for people without vision. (read most senior pastors (sorry) and board members...)

our enthusiasm and passion flow in a way that is like trying to drink from a fire hose sometimes... so most of the time we turn off the faucet. it's easier that way. less messy, and we make far smaller targets this way.

being at the path ignited that place in me that burns with a holy fire (i hope it's holy) to use our imaginations for god. i'm tired of being in 'off mode', trying to hide and not be who i am, and not see liam be who he could be. watching him try to fit into the business mode of doing church, overwhelmed with administrative busy work and reports to write is just stealing all the joy from his soul, and he's gotten so used to it that he doesn't even realize it anymore...

imagine... i can't remember if i told you that part of the path is envisioning yourself 3 years from now and writing the whole day down - morning to bedtime - what does that look like? this was dangerous ground for me to walk on. this meant i really had a life, not that i was a moon orbiting around everyone else's. and i liked it, i liked it a lot. liam did too, but the fear and the tapes in his head play so loud that the holy fire keeps dying out. imagine...

i wrote so much more but somehow it must have been closed down (pink and buck were playing on the computer and i must not have hit 'save draft', so i've lost the whole ending... - well imagine that it was wonderful! i'll try to remember what i wrote and edit it later...

i thought about this a lot this morning and guess that maybe the stuff that i wrote that got deleted was just for me, so maybe i'll keep it that way.