Imagining the impossible

Image by Okan Caliskan from Pixabay

Many years ago I had a dream in which I was in a Christian bookshop, looking at two cassettes in their music section. Yes, this was indeed a long time ago, maybe 30 years or so, back in the days when Christian bookshops were more plentiful and cassettes were still a thing. One cassette had a gold cover, the other one silver. In my dream, I knew that both contained the most beautiful, inspiring worship songs. I couldn’t wait to get them home and listen to them. Of course, at that very point I woke up. The sense of disappointment was sharp – I had truly yearned to hear glorious worship that gave a taste of heaven. But it was only a dream. I could only imagine how such music might have sounded.

CS Lewis, in his essay ‘The Weight of Glory’, writes of how we dream of the glories beyond the circles of this world, and how one day, thanks to God, “we shall get in.” Few writers have influenced me on the subject of heaven as much as Lewis has. The final Narnia chronicle, The Last Battle, brilliantly describes the tricky subject of the ‘end times’ through the medium of children’s fantasy. The old Narnia dies and the new Narnia emerges, out of the shadowlands into reality … the Ultimate Reality, as God makes everything new. (Poor Susan Pevensie’s fate remains controversial to this day. I don’t think Lewis got it quite right re: Susan …but I still love Narnia.)

Impossible things are on my mind quite a bit at the moment, not least the challenge of death and mortality. A dear friend of mine died recently – she was only a week older than me. I plan and hope to say farewell to her in a fortnight’s time. The finality of death floors me … it really is raw faith that makes me cling to the promise of eternal life. That’s the wonder of our faith … that Jesus fully tasted the rawness, bitterness and ugliness of suffering and death, bearing all that the human race could throw at him (the human appetite for unleashing misery on fellow humans remains unabated), and fully conquered all of it. In Christ, death is a defeated enemy – but it often does feel like an enemy.

Which fellow writers – outside the Bible – have helped you face up to the reality of death while holding onto the hope we have in Christ?

What books and poems inspire you to dream of heaven, of impossible things?

How has that impacted on your own writing?

I could name many Christian writers and poets who have inspired my imagination and strengthened my faith. Art and music are also beautiful pools of healing and wonder.


I hope that my own writing will help others on their journeys, so together we can dream of impossible things in a world that is hungry for hope and compassion.

I’m an Anglican lay minister and Administrator for the education and learning office of the United Reformed Church. I wrote a devotional for the anthology Light for the Writer’s Soul, published by Media Associates International, and my short story ‘Magnificat’ appears in the ACW anthology Merry Christmas Everyone.