Worry: The Misuse of Imagination

For years our back door had been its original, boring grey metal color. Not only that, but rust was growing along its panel edges, even though we have a clear glass storm door, too. And to top it off, there were a handful of little tar splatters from the time we had our driveway resurfaced.

It's weird how we learn to live with things like that, especially important things like doors where people get the first impressions of our homes. And it's especially bad when you consider that where I live, all our neighbors, delivery people, friends and relatives use the back door. You could nail your front door shut and no one outside your family would even care.

Well, finally last week I painted our back door a terrific medium-dark country-blue. Not only that, but I stenciled a white bow with a little heart in its center, then beneath that, I stenciled the word, 'Imagine.'

What an improvement!

With the whirlwind of activity around here I got to thinking about how worry is a misuse of my imagination. If I am worrying, then I'm imagining that something negative will happen. I am using my imagination to picture a bad outcome and then dwelling on what I see happening in my mind.

I'd much rather use my imagination for purposes God intended, like, picturing ways I can help others or ways I can decorate my home. Or ways I can stretch our money and live on less or how I can lose weight, arrange my garden or get more done in my day.

But I do not want to use my imagination as a canvas for worry. When I look at that word, 'Imagine,' on my back door, I want to use it as a signal to ponder the good which is ahead of me. I want our visitors to ponder that, too.

Speaking of imagination, back when we lived in a double-wide mobile home in the bleak Nevada desert, I wrote the following poem which was later published in the homemaking magazine, Welcome Home. This poem spoke of a place only in my imagination--a place I somehow saw on the road ahead of me... the place where we moved to years later--this place. This place I like to think God imagined for me because He loves me and He knew I would love living here.

Autumn After School

French-braided children
And ones in little blue jeans
Gallup with hands upraised
In our shadowing backyard.
Even the bitten-eared cats
Chase dotted yellow-brown leaves
Not wetted flat by the
Evening raindrops--
Such memory-jarring scents!
My husband escaped, too,
From an office-afternoon
To caress my fingers on our
Cold wrought-iron bench
And to watch children climb
While the sun falls--
Kids silhouetted in trees,
Burying us deep in golden leaves.