Old Windows – New Imagination

“Let there be many windows to your soul, that all the glory of the world may beautify it.”

– Ella Wheeler Wilcox

The five week Living Forward class at our church is coming to a close.  We have explored the value and reasons for this process.  It involves, using one’s imagination, exercising the discipline of reflection and willingness to confront the reality of where one is versus where you really want to be.  This week, along with others in the class, I am taking my retreat day for the Life Planning process.

Normally this would be an annual event, but since I did my inaugural life planning session last February as part of the book launch, it is coming around at the nine month mark.  At the time of the book launch, I had already set my goals for 2016 and was able to place them under the life plan umbrella at that time, but the life plan review fits better at the front of the whole goal planning thing.  Since this is the time of year I review the current year’s goals and begin looking to next year, I am resetting the timing.

I am excited.  As part of the preparation for my retreat day, I have been thinking about this whole imagination thing again.  It’s rather like a window.  It beckons.  It teases.  It stimulates.  The word imagination in Hebrew scripture  means “the making place”.  In Genesis 2, it says that God made or imagined man out of the dust of the earth.  The Hebrew has within it the sense that before God actually made man out of the earth, He imagined mankind.  The making place.  I like that.  We “make” things first in our thoughts or imagination before they are made in the physical.  It works both in the positive and negative and we get to choose.  Life Planning puts us in the choosing rather than reacting place.

Some windows stimulate memories and imagination.  This past summer when I returned to my hometown for a high school reunion, I discovered that one of my classmates lives in the house where my dad’s first employer lived.  Attached to the back of the house was “the shop” (Photo) from where they sold automobile and other vehicle parts.   My classmate graciously invited me over to visit.  It was marvelous to step back into time.  As I walked through the shop I heard the sound of my Dad’s voice, the guy talk as transactions were made and his laughter as he joked around.  In spite of the years that had passed the smell of automotive dust, oil and machine parts lingered.

However, it was “The Old Window” that brought things together.  The window in the door that began the transition from the shop to the house.  It transported you from the working, usually a bit dusty, rough working world, through a tidy business office into the elegant, neatly appointed home of the Mr. and Mrs. Burroughs.  It was usually quiet with only the sound of a ticking mantle clock.  The colors were a soft foam green done in a no-classical decor.  There was crystal everywhere.  It was heaven and I was not supposed to be there uninvited or unsupervised.  Too many pretty and fragile things that curious hands might break.

You see?  Old windows.  When explored they fling open the imagination.  Whether the windows of our soul, or a tangible, physical window, they serve to lead us into the making place.  Into places forgotten or tucked away, and to places yet to be found.  I will be peering anew through the windows of my imagination this week.  Daring to dream from the making place.