We’re thrilled to hear devotional thoughts from Rebekah Hawk this week! You can learn more about her on our contributors page.
This month, my rambunctious homeschool crew is studying the continent of North America. So far, we have brought Northern Canada to life by making a terrific mess mixing baking soda and shaving cream (supposed to be homemade snow), we have cooked and wrangled snow crab legs (closest thing to Alaskan crab!), listened for the secret freedom words in spirituals from the South, and played a mariachi Pandora station while we ate dinner in Mexico (beef and cheese enchiladas, ole!) But my favorite pastime (and cleanest!) this month has been our read-aloud: Anne of Green Gables.
I am just as surprised as you are that God is using a beloved childhood classic to bring us today’s devotional thought! But when our pastor reminded us that we need to use our sanctified imaginations to get the most from a text, and our Sunday School class zeroed in on the phrase “dull of hearing,” I could not ignore the connections.
The author of Hebrews is admonishing his readers because he is unable to speak to them about deeper things of God and frustrated with them because they have become dull of hearing. In other words, these believers are tired of hearing the same old thing; and contextually, they are bored with the basic foundations of our faith.
Ouch.
How many times have I tuned out a sermon when the preacher begins reviewing the Gospel—something I am sure I know already. How often have I drifted off when all-too familiar holy ground is tread?
How deliciously ironic that drifting off from the present reality could also be the antidote to dull hearing.
In Anne of Green Gables, Anne’s solution to almost every problem comes from her rich and inexhaustible imagination. She imagines beautiful names for every ordinary place in her new home, stories for her friends, fantasies to pass the time, and often, though her imagination leads her into hilarious hijinks, her imagination also gives her incredible insight, causing her to act with courageous compassion.
Exercising my God-given imagination to experience His Word with fresh eyes and ears is one way to destroy my boredom with familiar texts. Sometimes, I need to imagine that I do not have the entire Bible at my fingertips. Often, I need to suspend my modern perspective and applications when I am poring over these thousand-year-old thoughts.
If I do this, I might imagine how Thomas’s words in John 11 were incredible words of faith. I might realize that only Peter, James, and John knew that Jesus had raised someone from the dead before. Thomas was ready to be stoned with Jesus! He felt sure death was waiting for them if they dared return to Bethany to visit Lazarus’s grave. He had no idea Jesus was going to raise Lazarus from the dead.
I can think of no better use for my imagination than in engaging it as I read God’s Word, “because,” as Anne says, “when you are imagining, you might as well imagine something worthwhile.”
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