Imaging Prayer Sets Love on Fire

You’re carrying out your work for the Lord. You’re doing your best, working faithfully, believing… then one day you wake up and realize that you feel very distant from God. And it’s the same the next day, and the next day, and the next…

Remember Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind Love”?

If you could read my mind love
What a tale my thoughts would tell
Just like an old time movie
‘Bout a ghost from a wishing well
In a castle dark or a fortress strong
With chains upon my feet
You know that ghost is me
I don’t know where we went wrong
But the feeling’s gone and I just can’t get it back…

And you just can’t get it back.

Why?! If you’re working for God, if your faith is real, if you’re acting in His gifts and doing your best to live your life in His purpose, WHY do you feel so dry? So shallow? So… ghostly?

In spite of the prosperity preachers, tough things happen to everyone in this world. Sometimes that tough thing is a feeling of spiritual dryness, like you’re walking through a desert with no water.

That goes on long enough, and you feel like you’ve lost love—God’s love for you, your love for God, or both.

You KNOW love isn’t just a feeling. But what if it’s just not there at all? What if you’re doing the Lord’s work… and you feel like He doesn’t much know or care?

You may be going through a Christian’s dark night of the soul. (BTW, the phrase comes from a 16th century monastic, St. John of the Cross, and is purely Christian in its meaning.) I can write more about that in another post.

This one is about recovering love and joy when you feel absent from Him. You still believe! You know your faith; you know why you believe. You know your Bible, and there is power in the Word.

But the Logos, the Word, isn’t God’s only name. He is also the Holy Spirit. He is the God who gives visions to His people, who grants the gift of prophecy , who helps us experience Him and His love not only in our minds, but in our hearts.

We know God communicates to us in dreams and visions as well as the written word, because the Bible tells us so.

Job 33:14-16

Num. 12:6

Gen. 28:12

Joel 2:28, whom Peter quoted in Acts 2:16-18

Mt. 2:13

Acts 16:9-10

Acts 18:9

God is in the burning in John Wesley’s chest when he had the experience of the Holy Spirit’s blessing at Aldersgate. I experienced the same miracle several hundreds of years later when I gave my disaster of a life over to Him, and I quite literally felt my heart on fire.

God is in a dear friend’s vision of a peaceful pasture from Psalm 23 and a loving God who healed her from a lifetime of abuse and rejection.

God is in another dear friend’s revisited memories. As an adult, she painfully recalled her lonely school years. Then she allowed the Holy Spirit to enter those memories. In every one of them, she saw Jesus standing exactly where He had been—with her. Every time, every place. Light in darkness became the theme of her life, and her memories were healed.

The Lord sends dreams and visions in different ways: in night dreams, physical reactions, eternal visions, and visions from Him rising within our created imaginations.

I’ve experienced all of these types of dreams and visions, praise God. But it’s the last that I call imaging prayer, or Christian contemplative prayer taking place in our sanctified imaginations.

Imaging prayers are not daydreams or guided visualizations. They are visions from God that begin with a still image in your mind, and the Holy Spirit takes it from there. Not you. Not me. Him.

Along with the Bible, God’s beauty and love and sacred power will break through your depression, uncertainty, illness, or dryness. He not only shows you what you need, He invests you with love and power to become the person He created you to be. Now you are led by His Word: your foundation in Scripture, and your life’s hope and joy through knowing that God is speaking directly to you. Only He knows exactly what you need, and only He can perfectly provide it.

I have practiced imaging prayer for over 30 years, and this deep connection with the Holy Spirit transformed my faith life, my choices, and my ability to sense the great wonder and miracle of the world God created.

And after years of believing in God’s love but not really feeling it, I was finally able to feel His love in its depth, beauty, and majesty—and I loved Him back.

If you’re a Christian woman, please reach out to connect with me. It’s a little bit of getting-to-know-you but it’s more a holy place where we can listen to the Holy Spirit together, always based on Scripture. (I have my M.A. in Biblical Studies and my D.Min. in spiritual formation.)

We’ll talk and pray together and the Lord will show Himself in love and truth.