Imagination & prayer

This article is by a Christian singer, Audrey Assad.  She sings so beautifully for God and her love for Him runs deep.  To listen to one of her songs click on the link : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0B2ybZpDeM

Audrey writes......" Many of us view our imaginations as traps, as stumbling blocks to rational thought. Can you remember the last time you heard a sermon on the subject of the imagination? I cannot. And yet it is probably the most powerful tool we possess for the creation of art, whether for good or ill.
  As I see it, the next question is, can/does Jesus redeem the imagination? I believe the answer to be yes, which is why I do spend time using my imagination in prayer.".....(Please read her article below to get the full story)

"I have never forgotten the day I first actively used my imagination in prayer. In my mind’s eye, Jesus was swarthy, bearded, swathed in burlap—it was unthinkable in such heat. A dry desert wind covered Him in dust. I stood in line with many others, some sick with palsy, some holding children with disorders or diseases. Somehow I just knew He was going to find me out; that with one piercing look of His black eyes, He was going to see inside my veins and my capillaries and know that I had no disease to be healed of that day. And yet I could not tear myself away from that line. I could barely see Him at most points; the crowds pressed in so that I could only just make out the top of His head, occasionally glimpsing those flashing black eyes. He passed His hand over the face of a small boy afflicted with a neurological syndrome, and the little boy was made physically new, as though he had always been. His father wept for joy. I watched him shake with sobs.
After many moments, many miracles, finally I was next in line to see Him. And suddenly, the only thing between Him and me was thirty feet of golden flecks in the close air. Crowd sounds died down to a whirring murmur, and I locked eyes with the Man.
I stood there, my brow furrowed—I didn’t know what to do. Surely He would reproach me for taking up His valuable space and time! And so, unsure of how to act, I waited. His gaze was searching, indeed. It stung a little, even.
Then He smiled a little, and reached out His hand.
“Me?” I said in a small voice. My lungs felt vacuum-packed—I could not draw a breath. He stretched out His arms like an old friend.
And so I ran. I closed that thirty-foot gap with all the ferocity of a freight train falling off the rails. I wanted to collide with Love, to be strained and sifted through the weave of that rough cloth around Him and soaked right into His pores. We crashed into each other. He smelled like red spices and sweat. His robe sandpapered my cheek. All else faded. . .all else vanished. It was just Him, and me, in the scalding white light of the Eastern sun, and I knew His love for me. And as so many other times before, my heart was moved to love Him.
That day I had begun by thinking of Him as the healer of the multitudes. It is a story I have read countless times in various places in Scripture; I was taught it with felt-boards and sticky paper cutouts in Sunday School as a child, and preached to about it as an adult in the pews. Having never been terribly physically ill myself (with the exception of the multitude of varyingly serious food allergies I suffer from), I could wonder at the miracle of it, but never exactly empathized with the characters. In a completely new way, the day I prayed this and saw Him healing, I understood one of the central tenets of the Gospel; that though our bodies may be well, our hearts may be infirm; and though our bodies may crumble, our hearts may be wellsprings of life. I felt how sick my heart was when I put myself in the story. And though the physical encounter was imagined, the emotional and spiritual one was very real. I cannot prove that, but I do testify to it. I started that time of prayer viewing Him as the healer of the many; and by the end of it, I saw Him as the healer of me.
The risks of praying that way can be intimidating. Our imaginations are not wholly pure; they are informed by our context, our experiences, our culture, and they are crippled by sin. On top of that, the word “imagination” has taken on somewhat of a negative connotation in everyday conversation. Usually when you hear someone say “you’re just imagining it”, they are typically implying that whatever “it” is, is false. “It’s all in your imagination,” a friend might say to me when I believe someone to be angry with me who is not angry with me at all. Many of us fear imagining what God is like, because we might believe something wrong about Him, or be led astray by foreign ideas of God operating in our subconscious. Many of us view our imaginations as traps, as stumbling blocks to rational thought. Can you remember the last time you heard a sermon on the subject of the imagination? I cannot. And yet it is probably the most powerful tool we possess for the creation of art, whether for good or ill.
To settle some of these interior difficulties, it must be asked, what is the imagination? Dr. Peter Kreeft ¹ defines it this way; it is the ability to call up interior images of physical things, even when they are not externally present; it is the ability to conceive of things that we have never seen, or that perhaps do not even exist; and it is the ability to hold before the mind a meaning—to stand under it, to contemplate it. It is sensory, creative, and contemplative.
Our imagination, particularly in its creative and contemplative dimensions, is one of the particular things that sets us apart from the animals; it is one of the ways in which we have been created in God’s image. It has the capacity to express both light and darkness, and as such is a powerful tool in whatever way it is exercised. As I see it, the next question is, can/does Jesus redeem the imagination? I believe the answer to be yes, which is why I do spend time using my imagination in prayer. On that premise, it follows that our imaginations can be very helpful to our souls in both prayer and art.
Religious art is made using a combination of theology and imagination; I believe this holds true for worship music in a particular way. We who write for the Church take truths that are already formed and find a new way to imagine them—a new way to communicate them with imagery.
Take “How He Loves” (John Mark McMillan) as an example. The song is undoubtedly one of the more interesting and moving worship songs written during our generation; the first two lines say this;
“He is jealous for me.
Love’s like a hurricane;
I am a tree bending beneath
the weight of His wind and mercy.”
The picture is stunning, and effective. John Mark imaginatively found a way to communicate the very simple idea that God’s love is strong. Simple though the truth communicated may be, the lines would never have been written if McMillan had not exercised his God-given gifts of creative and contemplative imagination. We who desire to write songs for God’s people to sing in worship can be greatly assisted in our task by putting those faculties to good use. Anyone who has ever met and loved C.S. Lewis’ Aslan in his The Chronicles of Narnia can attest to the potential spiritual impact of creative writing. Lewis imagined a character that has helped many like myself to love God and desire heaven.
The one caution I offer, first to myself and then to anyone who reads this, is that anytime the use of imagination is intersected with prayer, we run the risk of creating images or ideas of God and looking upon them as private revelation. This is very dangerous. It isn’t impossible, but nor do I believe it is likely. Proper boundaries are needed. The renewal of the mind by consistent and faithful Scripture study is essential.
I plan to always keep thinking and dreaming about God and His heart, taking the risk of creating a mess. It is how I create images, and often how I write music; more importantly, it is one of the myriad ways in which I learn to love Him with more of my heart."

Article from : http://fqworship.com/blog/news/imagination-prayer-and-songwriting/
2011 Audrey Assad