Rekindling the Gift: Why Imagination Isn't Just for Kids

Somewhere between childhood and now, most of us quietly handed back a gift we were born with.

We don't remember doing it. There was no ceremony, no moment we could point to. It happened the way most important things happen—gradually, and without our noticing. One year we could look at an empty afternoon and see a hundred possibilities in it. A few years later we looked at the same afternoon and saw a to-do list. The imagination didn't die. We just stopped using it, and eventually forgot we had it.

I want to make a case for getting it back.

The gift we mislabel

We tend to file imagination under "children's things," somewhere near finger paints and pretend. Useful for a while, then outgrown. Something you set down when it's time to be serious.

But I've come to believe that's a mistake—maybe one of the more expensive mistakes we make as adults. Imagination isn't a phase. It's a gift, given on purpose, and it was never meant to expire.

Think about what imagination actually does. It lets you picture something that doesn't exist yet and then move toward it. It lets you hold a better version of things in your mind before that version is real. Every good thing that was ever built, mended, forgiven, or begun started as something someone imagined first. Take that away and you're left only with what already is—reacting to circumstances instead of reaching past them.

That's not a small loss. That's the difference between a life you're shaping and a life that's simply happening to you.

Rekindling isn't pretending

Here's where I want to be careful, because "use your imagination" can sound like an invitation to make things up. To paper over hard reality with wishful thinking. That's not what I mean at all.

Rekindling imagination isn't pretending the picture is prettier than it is. It's letting the truth repaint the picture we've been staring at.

Most of us aren't seeing our lives clearly. We're seeing them through a lens that got scratched by disappointment, by fear, by a hundred small "no"s we came to expect. We call that lens "being realistic," but it's often just being discouraged with better vocabulary. Imagination, rightly used, doesn't ignore reality—it insists on a fuller one. It asks: what if the truest thing about my situation isn't the part I'm afraid of? What if there's more here than I've let myself see?

For me, that fuller picture comes from letting the truth of God's word set the frame. Not as a way to escape my circumstances, but as a way to see them straight—to remember that I was made on purpose, for a purpose, by a God who is not out of ideas. When I let that truth do the painting, imagination stops being fantasy and starts being something closer to faith. It becomes the ability to trust that good things are possible, and to lean toward them.

What we can learn from the ones who never lost it

I have two kids, and watching them has taught me more about this than any book has.

Children imagine freely. They trust easily. They expect good things—and they ask for them without bracing for a no. Not because they're naive, but because nobody has yet convinced them to expect less. They haven't traded the gift away.

As adults we look at that and call it innocence, as though it's something to grow out of. But I wonder if we have it backwards. I wonder if that free, trusting, expectant posture is actually closer to how we were meant to live all along—and that the slow trading-away we mistake for "maturing" is really just a kind of forgetting.

That's not an argument for staying childish. It's an argument for recovering something childlike: the capacity to look at your life and still expect that good is possible.

Where this leaves us

I'm not writing this from the finish line. I'm writing it as someone who traded the gift away years ago and is only now, deliberately, trying to get it back. Some days I see the fuller picture. Some days the scratched lens wins. This is a practice, not a switch.

But I'm convinced the gift is worth reclaiming. Because a rekindled imagination changes how you pray, how you parent, how you work, how you love the people in front of you. It's the difference between letting life happen to you and living it on purpose.

So that's the invitation—to me as much as to you. Pick the gift back up. Let the truth repaint the picture. And start expecting good things again, the way we did before we knew better.

Let's rekindle this, on purpose.

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