So it begs the question have we become retarded in our
imaginations. Has all the visual
eye-candy that inundates us on a regular basis so stunted our minds as to not
imagine more than the same tired conventional futures? More to the point, if the world we live in
which is largely run by evil presents this consistent picture of our future
(and always without religion in any meaningful way) does that mean that the
Universe of God is so limited as well?
Or is this a simple matter of finite minds unable to grasp infinite
concepts? Let’s see.
To begin, close your eyes for minute, imagine the universe
as if it were a simple two dimensional map of hundreds of galaxies laid out on
an Atlas. Each galaxy has thousands of
stars (or suns). Each star has several
planets that orbit it (or star systems).
The math of the number of planets grows larger than most can fathom in
their heads. But stick with me for a
moment. Imagine the physical distance
between just 2 simple stars. To travel
between them, even exceeding light speed, could take centuries. Science fiction never really tells us how
long it takes to accomplish this feat and virtually never attempts it outside
of a given galaxy. Why does it
matter? How does God do it? O.K. fine, how do the angels do it? Flapping their wings? I don’t think so. Yet it happens.
Plausible answer: The
perfect beings of heaven are able to travel at the speed of thought. Transversing space in nanoseconds is
something we can hardly begin to comprehend.
Why? Is it because we have
accepted the idea that we are dependent on machines to facilitate any distance
we must cross? Or could it be that
because traveling even at this incredible speed still sends us to an unknown
destination. We fear the unknown more
often than embracing it.
Now let’s attempt to really challenge your mind to think in
a way it is not used to. Everyone
understands the concept of a ‘point’ on a piece of paper. Mark a second point and connect them and you
get a line (the beginnings of direction).
Draw an intersecting line with the first one, and you have 2
dimensions. Now picture in your mind
stacking 1000 sheets of paper on top of the first one; this gives you an object
with height, width, and length (3 dimensional space as we know it). But what if ‘mass’ were relevant? Could the thickness or density of an area of
3 dimensional space become measurable and therefore pliable? The concept of additional dimensions could be
introduced. What if time itself were
negotiable? Rather than thinking of time
as linear, think of all of existence, everything past, everything future, all
existing in the space of a nanosecond.
Sound farfetched?
Is not time a relevant measure already. For instance, how do you measure a
second. You examine it and it disappears
almost as fast as you look at it. In the
space of just a few minutes you easily lose track of the second you were
examining. In the space of an hour, the
second becomes even more miniscule. Now
think about what a non-eventful second looks like compare with a month, a year,
a decade, a century, and then a millennia.
The individual second becomes smaller and more meaningless when examined
against a larger and larger block of time.
At some point, seconds run together.
But this phenomenon is not limited to seconds; the same is true of days,
weeks, months, and years – if you look at them through the lens of millions of
years. At some point, even a year looks
just like the second did when examined over a long enough period of time.
Now let’s get back to our original second we looked at. If you were able to think faster, move
faster, be faster. The time of an
individual second could slow WAY down.
Ever watched a clock waiting for some future event? Did it feel like it was taking forever, even
though the time you had to wait was not that significant, perhaps only an hour
or two? Ever lost yourself in some
activity that was incredibly fun and time seemed to fly by you lightning
speed. You are so absorbed in what
you’re doing that you lose concept of time, it’s just gone? It turns out time may not be relevant is the
absolute measure we take it to be. And
why is our imagination so dull in this regard?
We just don’t think about heaven enough. We get content with our dwarfed picture of
the future, instead of expanding our minds with what is in fact probable. It might not seem important, but when we
pigeon hole ourselves with limited prospects we aspire to limited heights. When we forget what is in fact in store for
us, we begin to think that what we have is all there is. When we indulge in retarding our imaginations
it affects our entire lives. We start
looking at everything as routine, we stop seeing the infinite in anything, we
become mundane. It is a subtle attack on
hope. It is a way of dimming the rewards
to make looking at now as if now is all there ever may be.
We serve an infinite God.
A God who is able to be everywhere at once (bending of space). A God who has existed before and after any
measure of time (bending of time). A God
who defines what love is (something we study, and have a limited knowledge of,
but like our knowledge of space and time, we have lost our desire to understand
it more). The power of God cannot be
measured by our minds. Nor can His love. Think about it for just a brief second, our
God creates things, like He created us.
Things that do not yet exist He is capable of creating. And the act of creation does neither begin or
end with us. Creation will resume when
evil has been exterminated. And God does
not suffer from our limited imaginings.
Nor does He simply borrow from things that already exist and combine
them in some new form, which is pretty much our version of ‘new’ ideas.
We were not meant for limitations. We were meant to live. To think on a plain we do not often even
begin to contemplate in our routine lives.
We were meant to imagine more than we do. We were meant to experience Joy more than we
do, Love more than we do, Peace more than we do. Discard the limitations you impose on your
mind. And begin to allow God the freedom
to expand your capacity. Allow God to
remove the walls you have erected around your capacity. Do not allow others to define you, or to
limit you, allow God to show you what you were truly meant to be. In the extraordinary words of our
contemporary poets Switchfoot, “we were meant to live for something more, but
we lost ourselves.” Think about it …
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