The best saxophone player to ever grace planet Earth was born in North Africa in 425 BC. She lived her whole life without ever touching a saxophone. Some day 8,000 years from now in the New Jerusalem, she’s going to pick up a saxophone for the first time ever, and we’re all going to be astounded.
It’s going to take another thousand years before you and I get to hear her. She doesn’t like crowds all that much, and prefers to play really intimate venues. When we try to get her to play somewhere big so more people can enjoy it, she just laughs. “Are you afraid we’ll run out of time?” Gotta admit, she’s got us there.
Of course this little parable is exactly that—a parable. Even if (God’s sense of humor being what it is) every word of it turns out to be true, there’s certainly no way I could know that now. And that’s exactly my point. We live in the constant presence of an eternity so wide and deep we can’t actually know its extent, and yet we must live in a way that takes it into account.
This is one of the holy uses of imagination, as over against knowledge: imagination helps us reckon with realities too big to know. It helps us steer in the right direction, even when we don’t quite know where exactly we’re going, or what it will look like.
We know we are built for eternity. This life fits us out for eternity, but after we die, the vast majority of our life is still in front of us. (Side note: if you’re worried that you’re not living up to your potential, rest assured, you’re not. There’s not a ghost of a chance that anybody built for eternity could realize all that potential in a mere 80 years.) We know that, handcrafted for eternity, we are bound for the New Jerusalem, where we will encounter the saints of all the ages who are also bound for the same destination. What will that look like? We have very little idea, and yet we need to live our lives in light of the truths we know.
And so we feed our imaginations on the wild things that might be possible in such a reality…because the reality God made really is that wild.
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