The Artisan Soul (9 page)

It's an important question. Is God worthy of our lives only if he brings us effortless success? So in the story God allows Satan to take from Job everything that brings him joy, but he is not allowed to end Job's life. He can, however, make Job wish he were dead. As the story progresses, three friends come to interpret Job's experiences: Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. The Bible tells us they came to sympathize and comfort him. At first they don't speak a word when they see how great Job's suffering is, but it doesn't take them long to become the interpreters of his story. One by one they make their best effort to craft what could be best described as Job's remembered self. They take his experiences and attribute their own meaning to them, each in their own way condemning Job and using his experiences to prove he is not the man they once thought he was.

It would be an understatement to say that Job's story didn't make sense even to himself. If we take the story at face value, Job was not being punished for anything he did wrong. If anything, Job had garnered the admiration and affection of God himself. Job was the best example of a life well lived. There's nothing more confusing than to live a life pursuing God's highest ideals and then watch your life fall prey to unspeakable tragedy. Each of Job's friends was essentially answering the question “Why?” in an attempt to understand what had happened. Eventually Job, too, struggled with the why. Our great temptation in times like this is to assume the worst of ourselves, to assume the worst of others, and in the end to even assume the worst of God. That's why the resolution of Job 42, chapters later, is such a beautiful and compelling moment. Job's response to God has a powerful humility to it: “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know. You said, ‘Listen now and I will speak; I will question you, and you shall answer me.' My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:3–6).

I love the fact that God has an epilogue to the story. He goes to Job's three friends (with friends like this, who needs enemies?), and says to them, “I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has. So now take seven bulls and seven rams and go to my servant Job and sacrifice a burnt offering for yourselves. My servant Job will pray for you, and I will accept his prayer and not deal with you according to your folly. You have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7–8). You know the end of the story: God blesses Job in the latter part of his life even more than he did in the first, restoring to him sons and daughters and great wealth and prosperity.

The power of the story of Job is in Job's struggle, through multiple interpretations of his life, to discover and embrace the true meaning of his suffering. I love how the book of Job addresses through its literary form the destructive power as well as the significance of our interpretation of human experiences. Interpretation is the means by which we bring meaning to our experiences. As people of faith, who live our lives in the truth of the Scripture, we understand the importance of interpretation. Rarely do we think about the importance of the interpretation of life. We see life through a filter. That filter either blinds us to all the beauty, wonder, and possibility that surrounds us, or it brings them to light.

Our interpretation will be informed either by the worst of who we can be or by the best of what it means to be human. When we allow our filter to be shaped by bitterness and jealousy and envy and greed and hatred and apathy, our interpretation of life is skewed and the future becomes smaller and smaller. It is here that our interpretation of life causes us to experience each day with doubt and apprehension. When our interpretation of life is informed by the best of human emotions, when we are informed by love and hope and faith, it changes the way we see everything.

It was Einstein who said, “There are two ways to live your life—one is as though nothing is a miracle and the other is as if everything is a miracle.” Interpretation matters. What is your interpretation of life?

O
ne of my favorite scenes in the movie
Hook
is when Peter Pan was first brought to Neverland and invited to a banquet. All the Lost Boys sat at a grand table, drooling in anticipation of the feast they were about to enjoy. One by one, they began to devour an endless supply of the most delicious food a human being could ever imagine. Everyone was enjoying the feast except Peter Pan. From his vantage point, there was nothing there—the table was empty. The Lost Boys had lost their minds. If they were eating an impossibly delicious meal, it was for that exact reason—the meal had to be in their imagination. There was nothing there. Peter, it seemed, couldn't imagine a meal that good, so he was left with nothing. If Peter's reason prevailed, everyone would starve; if Peter could open up his imagination, he would join the rest of them in the celebration of abundance. The scene ends with an out-of-control food fight and a celebration so grand that even Peter could see it.

Part of Peter Pan's journey is realizing that somewhere along the way he lost his childlike imagination. Long before, he had traded it in for logic and sensibility. As we are all expected to, he had left childhood behind and become an adult. Somewhere along the way, he was convinced that maturity equaled an absence of imagination. To dream is a thing of children; to imagine, a luxury adults cannot indulge in.

For me, that scene was both inspiring and depressing—it was inspiring to imagine the endless possibilities if we could somehow materialize our dreams, and depressing because I became painfully aware that far too often good sense had replaced imagination in my own life. It is an interesting possibility, though, that there is a reality waiting to be materialized if we could trust in our dreams. Somehow, if we could only believe, we would be conduits bringing imagination into reality. And while perhaps we don't have the luxury of living in Neverland—where if we just believe hard enough, all the things we long for come into existence—there may be an underlying truth to this fable that we cannot afford to miss.

We artisans are created to transform the invisible into the visible. The creative act is a manifestation of imagination. Everything that exists began as an idea; everything we define as reality began as nothing more than imagination. Reality exists because it was first imagined. In fact, everything we know about the invisible comes to us in the form of the visible. Everything we know about God is translated through the things God created. God rested from his work of creating only when that creation was a complete manifestation of his imagination.

What was only an idea in the mind of God in verse 1 of Genesis 1 existed in totality by verse 31. Genesis 2:1 simply says, “Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.” This is an elegant way of saying that the creative process was complete.

The author of Hebrews indicates that understanding the relationship between imagination and image is critical to understanding who God is and how he works. It is also essential to understanding how God works in and through us. Note that I am not saying that God stopped being creative at the end of the sixth day: everything God does is an act of creativity. This realization changes our understanding of who God is, as well as how God works in relationship to human beings.

Hebrews 11:1 reminds us, “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for.” I have always been intrigued by the second half of that statement, but what is it that the ancients were commended for?

Hebrews 11:2 goes on to say, “By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command.” That is a summary of Genesis 1. The next part of this verse is critical: “So that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.”

The writer of Hebrews is reminding us of not only the creative process but also the material for the creative act. The ancients were commended for understanding that the physical world was created out of spiritual material—that what is seen was made not out of what was visible but out of what was invisible. The source material for the entire physical universe is the imagination of God. The ancients were commended for living in a unique relationship to this invisible reality. They were certain of what they did not see. Most of us struggle to be certain about what we do see.

God spoke the universe into existence with the material with which he started this creative endeavor, but that material was not made out of the visible. It shouldn't surprise us, then, that we who are created in the image of God are designed to engage life through the same process. We first dream; then we create. We first think; then we act. Even the Scriptures remind us that as a man thinks, so is he. Our internal world informs and forms our external world. Our inner lives provide the material from which we live out our lives. There is a universe inside us—a universe of thoughts, ideas, and dreams; a universe of fears, doubts, and questions; a universe of hopes, ambitions, and passions. Eventually the creative process demands that we choose from this invisible material, select what matters to us most, and materialize that imagination into reality.

You don't have to be Einstein to know that imagination is more powerful than knowledge, yet practical, everyday life seems to press us into an imaginationless reality. The longer we live, the more we become practical and reasonable. But if, at the core of what it means to be human, we are genuinely intended to be artisans, then imagination is never supplemental. It is always essential. The human imagination is perhaps the most distinct, unique, and valuable expression of being human. From a purely anthropological perspective, the ability to translate imagination into reality is a uniquely human attribute. Beavers build dams and bees build hives and ants build colonies, but humans are creatures not of simple instinct but of divine imagination. Humans create futures that exist only in the imagination. Every species builds, but humans create. Why in the world would we want to outgrow the influence and effect of the human imagination?

Several years ago, I was invited to a conversation at Columbia University in New York City. The subject was “What can be known?” On the panel were one of the university's premier scientists and the head of the Department of Humanities, who was a Kantian philosopher. After the opening remarks, I knew for certain that I should have come better prepared. In an auditorium filled with hundreds of students and faculty, it was not difficult to ascertain that my faith put me in a slim minority.

The scientist explained that only what can be proven empirically can be known. The professor of humanities, informed by the teachings of Kant, stated that what can be known is human action and therefore ethics. For a person who believes that what is seen was not made out of the visible, this is a particularly uncomfortable space to stand in, in a room filled with people who are convinced that all that exists is what can be seen.

So I admitted up front, “I cheated. I know things I shouldn't know. I know I'm not empirically supposed to know God or know things that exist in the invisible, but I'm reminded of the conversation between Peter and Jesus where Jesus asks Peter, ‘Who do you say that I am?' And Peter says, ‘You're the Christ, the son of the living God.' Then Jesus says to Peter, essentially, ‘You cheated. You got the right answer, but it wasn't because you studied.' He said specifically, ‘Flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.'

“The curious thing about knowing is that there are an endless number of layers of knowing. We can know two plus two is four; we can know that pi is an endless series of numbers that go off into infinity without even understanding what infinity is; we can know that the universe is ever expanding, although we have no experience of it; we can know there is dark matter and dark energy because of everything we don't know; we can know that we are in love but don't know why or how. We humans are highly complex knowing machines. There are so many different layers to knowing. So we shouldn't rule out the possibility that it's within our human capacity to also know God.”

After a wonderful conversation with two of the most interesting people I have had the opportunity to dialogue with in a long time, we moved to the Q&A. From my perspective, an endless number of questions on three-by-five cards were turned in. When I watched them divide the cards, there was a question or two for the scientist and a question or two for the philosopher and a stack of questions clearly coming my way. One of those questions stood out, though, and has never left me: “When you were a child, you had imaginary friends like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and God. Why did you get rid of your other imaginary friends and keep God?”

Even now, I still love this question. With very little time to construct a thoughtful response, I approached it like this: “First of all, it's clear you don't know me if you think I've given up my imaginary friends. Yes, you're right that when I was a small child I had imaginary friends like Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the giant rabbit that hid in my closet and only came out at night (but that's a different story), and God. I suppose if you conclude that all your imaginary friends are constructs of your imagination, then eventually all those imaginary friends should disappear with maturity. When my son, Aaron, was a little boy, he wouldn't eat his vegetables, but strangely enough he would go in the backyard and eat rocks. More than once we had to chase Aaron down and dig into his mouth and pull out the dirt and rocks that he was so determined to swallow and digest. But he wouldn't eat his mother's cooking, which was no small discouragement to Kim. No matter how hard she tried or how many different ways she threatened him, he would just look at those vegetables, and neither heaven nor earth could make him open his mouth and even give them a try.