"Many people do not consider themselves creative, often because they can’t draw or sing. However, every human being has been given the most essential tool for creativity, and that’s the human imagination. There isn’t a person alive on this planet without imagination. You may not be very imaginative, or you may limit your travels through your imagination, but you have one.
The imagination is God’s gift of creativity to humanity. It is the one way you can see the ideal, go to places you’ve never been, step into experiences you’ve never known. In your imagination you have unlimited resources, unlimited capacity, unlimited range of influence. In some ways, in our imaginations we are most like God.
Unfortunately the material for our imagination is primarily filtered through our hearts. When our hearts are separated from God, our imaginations can move to tremendous corruption. But when our hearts are joined to God, our imaginations can be the birthplace of the dreams of God for our lives. What dreams has God placed in your heart? Have you allowed him to take you in your imagination to places that now he desires to take you in history? When God dreams, reality forms. When we dream of God, we are both transformed and become agents of transformation.
The church can become the place where the great artists of our time paint their first strokes and the great musicians sing their first notes. The church can become the place where the great thinkers and the great scholars and the great writers emerge. The church can become the environment where the future’s poets and film directors, dancers and doctors, grow up in community and learn that their talents are a gift from God.
The future leaders of this world will come from somewhere. Shouldn’t it be the church? In a world filled with despair, drawn toward darkness, and conceding to existentialism and nihilism, where would the beauty that calls human beings to aspire toward greater things come from if not from the church?"
-Erwin Rapheal Mcmanus
(Leonard's personal hero)
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