Imagination A Gift From God

Affected Imagination

How do we let our imaginations get affected?

My imagination got affected by darkness – now this is a strong word being used because that darkness began to corrupt my wild way of thinking. It affected my active thoughts and my imagination that I had as a young boy. This corruption kept growing further from my teenage years, then eventually growing deeper into my adulthood years. Now when I use the word DARKNESS, I get the image of it being too dark that we cannot see. Like the experience of when you put your hand in front of your face, but it's so dark that you can't even see your fingers moving. Or the experience of when you are in a room and proceed to switch off all the lights and if the room is dark enough you just see pure darkness, until your eyes slowly adjust then finally after a while you begin to see objects again in the room. I began to realize that is why sin hides in the darkness, as it tries to destroy every dream that we ever have, and the reason why we let this happen is because our eyes haven't adjusted yet in order to see. In the dictionary the word DARKNESS has two definitions.

The first meaning - The partial or total absence of light.
The second meaning - Wickedness or evil.

Looking at these two definitions I could slowly see how they meant the same meaning. My childhood imagination slowly faded away because of darkness, remembering these sinful acts of darkness, I allowed into my life. In other words, I had switched off the light and now was trapped in this dark room. That dark room I'm referring to is always going to be sin in our lives – because darkness is the total absence of light. Sin removes the total absence of God in our lives, making us forget what it was like to have wild dreams like the dreams we have as children. I forgot how to be active in my way of thinking just like I was as a child, it just went on from how the darkness poured itself into my life – of how that dark room of sin and wickedness kept pouring itself into my heart. That was not what God intended to be in my life.

In fact He doesn't want that for any of our lives, through this journey of my life I saw why God doesn’t want this for us – God's gift in my life was not to corrupt it with sin and sit alone in that dark room. Which sin has a funny way of making us feel like we are completely empty and alone. Sin can defile our imagination with evil thoughts like this, which result in evil desires. This is a process that happens when we stop listening to God and begin to fill our thoughts and actions with bad deeds to help us fill the void, the empty feeling that this dark room does to us. Let's be honest, we just plainly forget about what God's gift is to us. All this mentioned is what I began to act on – as I entered my adulthood years and allowed this darkness to enter into my marriage. Through this process of my life I was destroying that beautiful, creative and pure imagination that had been given to me. Before we enter that chapter, let me slowly explain the simple reasons why these sins quickly take hold of us as teenagers, which most will already know.

How does it usually go wrong for us as teenagers?
So we all know that when we reach our teenage years it’s followed by all the peer pressures of life – always trying to fit in on what everybody else is doing.

A big culprit may be (What's cool and what's not cool to do). Another big culprit (Everyone is wearing that, or everyone says things like this).

That's just the shorter version as there's so much more on the list of peer pressure, I'm sure that you can make a list of what pressures you faced, or are facing now. What starts to happen in this process is we get so caught up in what everybody else is doing, (what everybody else is doing though isn't always the right things that we should be doing). As I entered into my teenage years I got caught up in drugs, then slowly the influence of alcohol took over my life. This then was followed up by the influence of gangs, small demonic circles and later on pornography. Everybody I knew was doing it and I ran straight into this trap of sin without even thinking of what the consequences would be. To me that is another basis of what sin is; it's the trap that hides in the darkness waiting to go off. Sin is a trap that the devil has put in place in order to hold us back, to trap and keep us in that dark room in order to bring us away from the promises of God. Let's imagine for a moment on how a spider makes a web, it makes the web in such a way that insects get caught in it without even knowing, this then allows the spider to devour the insect later. National Geographic might explain the whole concept of a spider and its web better than myself if you need help with that image.