Is It God or Your Imagination?

It was the night before a new prayer group.  I was curled in bed and peering in the dark. What was it going to be like?  Who was going to be there?  What was I going to  . . . an answer to my second question appeared as if a slide projector suddenly beamed on my visual cortex. 

I saw the back of a woman’s hand, fingers fanned out as if she was worried what her nails looked like.

Still curled and peering, I then saw a long and thin, wispy scarf.  Who is this woman?  I strained to see her face, but it was a blur.  She had no face. The slide projector went dark.

God proved again He can move in mysterious ways.  The only thing clear to me was I was going to meet this woman at church the next day.

But I wasn’t thinking about her as I sped up the pothole-patched road to church.  I was wondering why I was always late to a church that was only minutes from home.  It was really embarrassing when others drove an hour or more and got there on time. 

The room was nearly full, with people seated at round tables.  I slipped into the nearest free seat and looked down.  The minister had already asked everyone to introduce themselves.  Voices ebbed and flowed in an unmemorable stream until a woman at my table said, “I used to think God spoke to me, but then I came to believe it was all in my imagination.”   

As I looked at her, neurons in my visual cortex caught fire.  This was the woman!  She was wearing a long, blue wispy scarf just like I had seen the night before.

“Oh, honey,” I wanted to say as goose bumps tingled. “God Loves You so much. When I was with him last night, you were all he wanted to talk about!” 

But I didn’t speak with her.  When you say stuff like this, some Christians will jerk back the welcome mat quicker than a jilted atheist. Heck, I’d question someone I didn’t know who started talking about what they saw or heard in their head.  I often question myself.

But I wasn’t exactly silenced by these doubts.  I was fascinated by what I was seeing and silently explored further, knowing I was getting into something way beyond the woman next to me.  I’ve learned that sometimes what I see in others isn’t necessarily meant for them. It often is meant to show me something.

I thought about the image I had seen of a woman’s hand paired and a worry about what her nails looked like.  What meaning was there in this?  I also wondered what I was meant to see when I saw a blur for her face. 

A while later as I worked to write this post, I found my answer in a novel recommended by someone who didn’t know what I was struggling to understand:  Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold by C.S. Lewis. (Thank You, Joe!)

The main character, Orual, was a self-absorbed woman who hid her ugly face with a veil and longed to be reunited with her beautiful sister Psyche.  Orual blamed the gods for the wrenching separation. 

Late in the novel, however, she begins to understand the gods were not at fault.  She had caused her own suffering and estranged herself from her sister and the gods.  

“I saw why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer,” said Orual. “Till that word [which has lain at the center of our soul for years] can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces.” (page 294)  In other words, we have to know our selves before we can know God and experience His presence.

In Orual’s case, the jealousy she had towards her sister and her husband had to be dug out of her.   It took so long because she was more than a good person—she was a revered queen.  But when it came to her relations with the Divine and the sister she loved, she was so absorbed with self-justifying and cynical beliefs she had alienated herself from what her soul sought most.   

On the night before my prayer meeting, when I saw the back of a woman’s hand with fingers outstretched, I believe I also saw how the hand was blocking God from getting closer.  This is exactly what we do when we become self-absorbed, worrying or obsessing about anything. 

But experiencing the presence of God is not really a matter of confessing your sins.  Far, far from it! The spell is broken and Orual’s true face is finally revealed when a Divine voice tells her the beauty she revered in her sister Psyche also shines in her. 

In other words, if you want to feel the presence of God and hear His voice, there is one essential thing to do.  Both stories and my own lead me to sing the same refrain:  Embrace Your Divine Nature and Get in the Light.  Draw near to the people and places where you feel God’s Love shines the brightest.  Read the stories of those who tell of the Light that has come into this world. Take time to be still and recognize the Divine Light God has poured into you!  And multiply the Love in and around you with acts of kindness. You’ll be amazed at what happens next.

You may start hearing whispers of an inner voice and seeing weird things like fluffy scarves.  But how do you really know God is speaking to you?

It’s a big leap, and I’ve gone many rounds with this question.  After a couple of years, I’ve developed an approach that seems to work. 

First, hold what you’ve experienced up in the Light and ask:  Is there something uncanny about what you’ve heard or seen and what’s going on around you?  Is there an amazing thread of logic or symbolism in it?  Did it seem to come out of the blue or have a certain “otherness” about it?  Is it in harmony with what you know of a Loving God?  If these questions don’t settle it for you, ask to see things more clearly. 

Of course, you may feel a Divine hand is at work but still think it’s all in your imagination like the woman with the fluffy scarf did.   For all of us who have stumbled over this thought, I now have an answer.  It was given to me—appropriately enough—by an angel who speaks in Todd Michael’s amazing book The Evolution Angel (page 15):

“All communication with Spirit takes place through the imagination.  The imagination, the part of the mind that can synthesize images, is one of the highest faculties of the mind.  Don’t knock it.  It is the end product of several billion years of painstaking evolution.  Second only to love, the ability to imagine makes human beings sons and daughters of the great Creator.  All creation, all great accomplishment, and all communication with the Spirit begins within the imagination.”

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