Asking The Wrong Question

When the Disneyworld resort opened in 1971, Edna Disney was asked to speak. Although her husband Walt had been the driving force behind the design and construction of the resort—even often sharing ideas while fighting sickness in a hospital bed—he died before it opened. As a result, she was asked to speak on his behalf. The person who introduced her said that he thought it was an unfortunate and tragic fact that Mr. Disney never got to see the resort that he spent his entire life trying to build. When she got to up speak, Edna delivered one of the shortest speeches in history. She simply said “He did see it.” Then she sat down.

What Edna meant is that her husband saw the resort in his imagination. Had he not seen it in his imagination, it would have never come to fruition. All things are created twice—first in the imagination and then in the world. The computer that I am typing on now was first imagined in the mind of Steve Jobs before it was produced in a factory. The car you drive was first an idea in an engineer’s mind before it hit the assembly line. The house, condo, or apartment that you reside in was first a sketch on an architect’s drafting table before a construction permit was ever issued for it to be build. Imagination, Albert Einstein once said, is more important than knowledge. Most of don’t need more information. We need more imagination.

In his book The Prophetic Imagination, Dr. Walter Brueggeman writes that:

The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same…consciousness that makes it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one….(often urged) as the only thinkable one.

Cultivating the imagination is a ministry—a ministry that unfortunately is often neglected and ignored. Most of us spend so much time focused on, worried about, and obsessing over how something can’t happen instead of imagining how it can. We specialize in what Brene’ Brown has called “disaster forecasting.” Instead of imagining possibilities, we imagine monsters. Instead of focusing on what or why, we allow “the how” to stymie and stop us.

“How” was the question that Mary asked when God sent the angel Gabriel to inform her of the startling news that she had been chosen to give birth to Jesus. According to Luke 1:29-34, her reaction was even more startling!

Confused and disturbed, Mary tried to think what the angel could mean. “Don’t be afraid, Mary,” the angel told her, “for you have found favor with God! You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be very great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David. And he will reign over Israel forever; his Kingdom will never end!” Mary asked the angel, “But how can this happen? I am a virgin.”

“How” is the question of implementation. “How” is the question of practicality. “How” is the question of plans, process, programs and procedures. “How” is the question of deadlines, budgets, and deliverables. But as one writer has observed, fear is often disguised as practicality. If we don’t believe that something is possible, then we use the perceived difficulty of implementation as proof that it can’t happen. But as Brueggeman reminds us, the issue is rarely in the implementation. The failure is usually in our imagination. The angel had to remind Mary that with God, all things are possible. Later, she accepts the impossibility, and says “be it unto be according to your word.”

What a powerful statement. Mary surrendered her fear to her faith, and decided to leave the implementation of Gods’ plan in Gods’ hand. Mary realized that if what God said was going to happen, it wouldn’t be according to her intellect, budget, credentials, or credit. If it was going to happen, God would have to bring it to pass.

My mother once told me that the person who only knows how will always work for the person who knows why. Stop focusing on the how. Start focusing on the what and the why.

How is the wrong question.