I have always loved school… the books to read, knowledge to be gained, new discoveries to be made and a new world being revealed to me through passionate teachers with a calling that would bring out a lifelong desire to learn in me. I didn’t love everything about school, of course, like when kids weren’t nice to me or others, when teachers were so bored with their job that they made learning boring too, or when we were all held back to lengthy discussions about a certain concept because some of the students simply weren’t comprehending it.
Because of my enthusiasm to learn, I wanted to please my teachers and follow all the classroom rules. I sat quietly when the teacher was talking, I raised my hand when I had something to ask, I put in my best efforts on projects, and I carefully worked to improve my handwriting. I expected perfection from myself and wanted to learn from every single mistake so I wouldn’t make it again. I enjoyed the positive attention that I got from my teachers when I did well and I beamed when I got a star or a smiley face on an assignment.
As a reader, I loved getting lost in the imagined lives of others that were built in my mind through weaved words on a page as I devoured book after book, and sometimes I didn’t want to come back to reality. If I had one shortcoming as a student, it was that I was a daydreamer. If my mind wasn’t fully engaged or challenged, my tendency was to let my mind drift off and imagine great and glorious adventures, filled with layers and layers of details that I could almost feel, hear, and see. My attention would have to be brought back to the classroom by the teacher repeating my name or clapping her hands, and then I would lower my head in embarrassment that I had forgotten that I was sitting in a desk at school and was supposed to be focused on the here and now.
Feeling embarrassment as the attention in the classroom was suddenly on me and that some kids shook their heads or chuckled that I was being reprimanded gently by the teacher, it always made me shrink a bit lower in my desk chair. Since daydreaming and imagining complex and interesting stories wasn’t rewarded or applauded by my teachers because they had a curriculum to follow and specific lessons to guide us through, I tried to silence my wandering imagination.
A SILENCED IMAGINATION. Wow. This realization hit me like an icy cold wave as I had thought this story was heading in a different direction. I have felt silenced in many different ways throughout my lifetime and have only recently been finding my voice, but I have never thought about one of the earliest, and perhaps most important, areas that we all get silenced in… our imagination.
We were created with such depth, complex brains, talents, abilities, and a lifetime of adaptive growth by God that it is truly mind-blowing to think about. When humans are born with physical or mental limitations, gene variations, and inherited tendencies, it is still pretty easy to see the hand of God on their lives as they express higher abilities or resiliency of character in other areas.
How sad it is that we limit every child’s potential through silencing them when God created us each so uniquely. We start from a very young age without even realizing it in an attempt to silence anything that doesn’t match up with our expectations of behavior and our desire to have order, and we inadvertently force them to fall in line with society. We seem to be trying to create a world of sheep, and God didn’t create us to be like sheep. We try to silence our baby’s cries, offer distractions to silence their noisy curiosity as they grow, silence their questions in public because someone might get offended or annoyed, bribe them to be silent in places where adults are gathered, and silence their imaginative play by putting them in front of a television, tablet, or phone.
How arrogant of us to think that we know better than God how society should look on earth! We have rewarded behaviors that match up with our expectations for as long as I have been alive, and likely for generations before that, going back to the beginning of the fall of man in the Garden of Eden. This isn’t even a stretch to imagine the answer, but yet it’s a question that I have never heard anyone ask.
What if God created us each uniquely and complexly because our human society would thrive if we all lived through our God-given purpose, using our talents and abilities to be the best we could be in our own individual ways?
If someone has a knack for exploring deeper concepts, envisioning new worlds, writing, and storytelling, for instance, but those things aren’t rewarded, encouraged, or celebrated, then they are wasted. Society was missing out on what God had planned for good. The skills and talents in me that were encouraged in me weren’t necessarily bad, but by following what others expected me to do instead of what God was calling me to do, I have missed the mark for nearly fifty years of my life.
Time doesn’t stop, and we can’t go back in time. But when we know better, we do better, and this is my plea for all who will hear…
God knows each and every one of his children intimately, even knowing our thoughts and our hearts, and he crafted each of us with love and care in our mother’s womb. God takes delight in our accomplishments and in watching us learn to walk on the path of our lives that he has so specifically laid out in front of us. He created us with the ability to choose every step, to choose to believe in him or not, to choose who to listen to and follow, and to choose every action, every response, and every thought. While he created us with a very specific purpose in mind, he has left it up to us to follow his plan or not.
I have done so much wrong with the four children I raised to adulthood. I listened to the demands of others and silenced the one voice that should have been amplified through them… Jesus. Let his voice be heard through the children. In God’s perfect design, the world should be filled with laughter, joy, crying, hugs, imaginative play, connection between all races and cultures, exploration, a desire to learn new things, working together in all things, simple pleasures, rest, creating art, singing, holding hands, running, falling, climbing, and holding kitties. Playing in the sand, splashing in the water, dancing in the rain, watching the clouds, soaking in the stars, listening to the birds, creating stories, building things, and imagining a world that is glorious… these things are what we are born knowing how to do, and yet we don’t encourage any of them in others or allow them freely in ourselves.
What is wrong with this world? It is that humans, in their desire to maintain their illusion of control, have silenced the voice of God that flows freely through his children. It’s time to break the silence and AMPLIFY THE IMAGINATION OF GOD’S CHILDREN. (By the way, we will never outgrow being a child of God, so get your megaphones up and hold them out for others who are bravely finding their voices in a world that has silenced them.)