Love God with All Your Imagination

Growing up in a nominally Christian household, I caught my first glimpse of the gospel reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. At seven years old, I lay belly-down on my pink shag carpet, breathless as Aslan saved Eustace Scrubb from his dragonish form. I wasn’t raised in the church, so I had no language for the gospel truth C.S. Lewis portrayed in that scene, but I knew I had read something wondrous.

Thereafter, I delighted in weaving stories. Dreaming up faraway lands exhilarated me, and I relished how words could bristle with sharp edges or flow as smoothly as water. Most of all, through writing I strived to capture that elusive joy I’d first experienced in Narnia.

Then I grew up — and dove into the world of statistics and vital signs, laboratory values and chemical pathways. During medical school, when exhaustion seeped into my bones, I’d sometimes let my mind wander to magical places, but in short order the next patient would arrive in the emergency room. With a snap of my white coat, I’d brush away fantasy and focus on the real world. Perhaps you, too, have set aside whimsical stories for the more pressing demands of adulthood.

I only remembered my daydreams again — and learned to cherish and steward them — when my son and I journeyed through Middle-earth.

The Return of the King

When the COVID pandemic struck in 2020, my seven-year-old son struggled with questions about God. Every time I donned scrubs for a night shift, he worried I’d return home sick with the virus. “Why would God allow this to happen?” he’d ask. “Is God even real?”

To guide him, my husband and I walked him through studies of Job and John 11, meditating on God’s faithfulness in suffering. Gradually, Scripture took hold and brought him back into the light. And then a reading of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King brought these truths into brilliant relief.

One night before I drove to the hospital, my son and I read about the siege of Minas Tirith. Enemy forces swarmed the battlements of the free people. Gloom and despair hung about the fortress like a fog. All seemed desolate, lost, hopeless.

Then the Riders of Rohan galloped down the plains to liberate their kinsmen, and the scene changed: “for morning came, morning and a wind from the sea; and darkness was removed” (The Lord of the Rings, 838). Tears misted my son’s eyes, and we talked about how we too had assurance of the morning. Although 2020 appeared bleak, our Savior would return. Dawn would break. And Jesus would make all things new (Revelation 21:5).

“Good stories enthrall us because they point us to the ultimate happy ending.”

As I drove along the highway afterward, a long-forgotten doorway — a wardrobe — opened in my mind. I finally understood the wonder I had experienced that day on my pink shag carpet. My wanderings through Narnia had given me my first glimpse of the gospel, and my son’s journey through Middle-earth had sharpened his vision of heaven.

Suddenly, stories didn’t seem frivolous anymore.

Glimpses of the Gospel

Beyond offering mere childish entertainment, stories shape minds and hearts, linger in the imagination, and depict virtues that we can grasp, savor, and turn in our hands. In fact, Tolkien, the father of modern fantasy literature, believed that the best stories thrill us because they resonate with gospel truth. In a conversation with Lewis one evening while they strolled through Oxford, Tolkien compared stories to prisms: Just as a prism splits a beam of white light into its separate wavelengths, so also stories reflect fragments of divine truth. In his biography, Humphrey Carpenter summarizes Tolkien’s thinking:

Just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth. We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed, only by myth-making, only by becoming a “sub-creator” and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. (J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, 151)

Myths, Tolkien argues in his essay On Fairy-Stories, delight us because they echo elements of the gospel. “The peculiar quality of ‘joy’ in successful Fantasy can be explained by a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. . . . It may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world” (77–78). He further describes Christ’s resurrection as the ultimate “eucatastrophe,” or happy ending, toward which all great stories point:

The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. . . . There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. (78)

In other words, good stories enthrall us because they point us to the ultimate happy ending. As the Author of life, God is the storyteller who has penned the most magnificent tale of all time: the story of a fallen, broken world; a fallen, hopeless people; and the astonishing Savior who laid down his life for them. Because we are his image-bearers, we have the ability to weave stories so that others might see reflections of him in each happy ending.

Created to Create

This is good news for grown-ups caught daydreaming. Although we may dismiss them as juvenile amusements, our daydreams can be the earliest seeds of God-honoring stories. In fact, the loveliest stories often originate from the godly stewardship of images that burst into the imagination. Take Lewis for example:

All my seven Narnian books . . . began with seeing pictures in my head. At first they were not a story, just pictures. The Lion all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. . . . At first I had very little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. (Of Other Worlds, 42)

Similarly, Andrew Peterson’s The Wingfeather Saga began with a sketch of a map. And Tolkien’s The Hobbit sprang to life from a single sentence that interrupted his thoughts as he graded papers: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

“Our daydreams can be instruments in God’s glorious hands.”

I experienced something similar the night my son and I read about the Riders of Rohan. At three o’clock in the morning, as ventilators sighed throughout the ICU, a picture of a dragon with its head in a Crock-Pot full of chili popped into my thoughts. After rounds, when all the patients were stable, I sat down with a piece of printer paper and a pen. Nine months later, those scribblings morphed into the first book of The Dream Keeper Saga.

Rather than distractions to stuff away, our daydreams can be instruments in God’s glorious hands. Because God made us in his image (Genesis 1:26), our hearts pulse with an urge to create. Singer and songwriter Michael Card explains, “We are driven to create at this deep wordless level of the soul because we are all fashioned in the image of a God who is an Artist” (Scribbling in the Sand, 39). John Piper, too, reflects on this calling:

Imagination may be the hardest work of the human mind. And perhaps the most God-like. It is the closest we get to creation out of nothing. . . . The imagination must exert itself to see it in the mind when it is not there. We must create word combinations, and music, and visual forms that have never existed before. All of this we do because we are like God and because he is infinitely worthy of ever-new verbal, musical, and visual expressions.

Dear Daydreamer

How do we take up this calling to create for God’s glory? How do we steward the images, words, and music tumbling through our minds when deadlines, taxes, spilled bottles, and a plethora of other responsibilities require our attention?

Dear daydreamer, when your imagination meanders through new realms, take heart. When you translate what you see and what you imagine into words on a page, you’re not wasting time — you’re participating in God’s workmanship. When you chase after the images in your mind and pull from them lovely shadows, you’re tapping into a gift that only the Creator can give.

So, pay your taxes. Meet your deadlines. Clean up the spill on the floor. But then take up a pen, call to mind dragons and lions, and allow the story to sweep you up in its breadth and scope. Pause to admire glimmers of the gospel piercing through the gloom. When done with joy, writing is caught up in worship. And even when the activity seems trivial or childish, when you write for joy in him, your words can shape hearts — just as Lewis’s and Tolkien’s stories touched mine. So, read, share, and celebrate great stories. And if so moved, write them yourself.