10mm

Is reality shaped by imagination?

The LORD said to him, "What is that in your hand?" Exodus 4:2

I had been working on my motorcycle in the garage. I was happily in the zone, that place where you go when you are doing something you enjoy and time melts away. Suddenly I couldn’t find the wrench I had just used and needed again. Snap! Just like that I’m pulled out of the zone and and back to reality. Time once again begins its beat and I’m racing against the clock to find my wrench so I can get back into the zone, finish my work, and go riding - another pleasant zone.

As I said, I knew I had just used the wrench. I hadn’t moved from my seat on the crate since I used it, so it must be within sight and reach. It’s not like it could be under a hill of parts or in the engine somewhere. I had only been making some simple adjustments. “I know it’s here. It has to be.” I mumble to myself. Not finding it within reach where it should be, I expand my search to the area beyond my work space. Perhaps it bounced away. No such luck.

I walk to the tool box twenty feet away. My brain is doing mental gymnastics, trying to justify the idea that I might have put the wrench away, even while hanging on to the thought that I hadn’t moved from my seat, so the wrench couldn’t have made it back to the toolbox.

This wasn’t a first-time occurrence. Ask any technician that works with tools. I had been wrenching on various motorized and non-motorized machines for decades, and a tool disappearing into the ether is not all that uncommon.

Somehow my reality became warped. What was real one minute, the 10mm wrench in my hand, was now the object of a mental and physical search. It put a thorn in my brain that couldn't be plucked out, but demands that I tweeze it, tug on it, wrestle with it.

Twenty frustrating minutes of searching, many times over the same spots, I give up. I may not be taking the Kawasaki for a spin today. I walk into the house to tell my wife of the frustration, of my journey into the mechanic's Twilight Zone of missing tools, really of my deterioration of mind. Is this how Alzheimer’s first manifests?

She patiently listens as I ramble on about how I couldn’t find the wrench that I had just used which had to be there but no longer was and I’m losing my ever loving mind. I wasn’t expecting her help, but maybe venting would loosen the thorn.

If she had noticed it from the time I entered the room blabbering about twenty lost minutes and waving my arms around, she didn’t let on. She just patiently waited until I was done, until the moment I lifted my arms while exclaiming, “I can’t find that wrench.” And there was the missing wrench in my hand where it had been since I last used it.

“I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither shall anyone snatch them out of my hand.” John 10:28

Our Lord knows what is in His hand, and he knows how he will use it. Just as our tools are extensions of our selves, in our Creator's hands we are extensions of Him.

To me the reality that afternoon was that I had somehow lost a wrench. My mind didn’t tell me it was still in my hand and I simply hadn’t put it down. This was a reality my mind made up, basically a lie to myself. The lie was that I had used the wrench and put it down somewhere. From that reasoning there was no purpose in looking to see if my hand was still clutching it.

If self lie is too strong of a term we can call it a failure of imagination. Due to faulty reasoning that I had put the wrench down somewhere, I failed to imagine that I hadn’t. Imagination and reason often battle each other, and a deficit of one allows the other to dominate. In the case of the missing wrench my mind never imagined that it was still in my hand, so reason led me on a wild goose chase where no goose could be found.

Reason has to do with the things we know. Through reason we apply what we know to the problem or argument at hand.

Imagination has to do with what we don’t yet know. Without imagination the quest for new knowledge never gets started. Imagination pokes at reason and says, “Here’s something you haven’t considered; suppose it is true?” Then we have to wrestle with that supposition through reason, wrenching on it with the things we do know, and prove it either true or false. New knowledge doesn’t come about by reason alone. There has to be the spark that ignites imagination.

Moses couldn't imagine that his brethren in Egypt wouldn't believe by his words that God sent him to deliver them.

The LORD said to him, "What is that in your hand?"  Exodus 4:2

We all use tools of one kind or another. When God asked him what was in his hand, Moses said a rod, a staff. It was a tool. Then God told him what to do with it to testify of God's works. Moses had it at hand not even imagining how God would have him use it. Tools are an extension of ourselves, a part of us when we use them. God uses us to testify of Him, and as an extension of our selves tools and the work we do with them can be a part of that testimony, if we use them in a way that honors God.

Over fifty years ago an old master craftsman, Clarence Scheidel, taught me and many others the craft of auto body repair - the old school kind with lead and torches and lots of noise (“Always use the biggest hammer you can.”) As a good teacher should be, he was a great storyteller. He told of how how his family never lacked work throughout the Great Depression because they were always ready with their tools and so there would always be customers on Monday morning. At about the same time I had read a quote in a book that said the same thing, and it has stuck with me:

"Have thy tools ready. God will find thee work.” Charles Kingsley

Our Master has work He created us to do. We must have our tools ready. Sharpened. Oiled. Adjusted.

In case you're wondering, it got too late to go riding that day. But I was okay with that.