A Little Became a Lot

Our friend George Dunn led us in a very interesting Free Store discussion on Thurday morning about creativity and imagination. He started the conversation by telling us that he had been thinking about bankruptcy and he said that there were currently about 9.1 million homes in our country going into foreclosure. He said that he knew what it was like to lose everything because at one time he had lost his job, house, family, friends, and even his faith in his religion. He told us that the American dream had become a nightmare for him.


At this point he told us that he wanted us to look at a story in 2 Kings 4. Someone said that they had come across a commentary on the book of Kings that was titled, "Men Behaving Badly" which made us laugh. It seems that no good comes of it when men have too much power. In the story a widow is about to have her children sold into slavery to pay her debts. George said this might have actually had an upside, especially if she had teenagers which gave us a good laugh.

As we continued in the story we learned that all the woman had left was a small bottle of olive oil. Interestingly this small bottle of oil was multiplied into enough to save her kids from slavery and give the family extra to live on. George said that this story illustrated that God doesn't leave anybody with nothing. He said that what we have may seem very small but that the real problem is that we don't recognize the value or the potential of the little we do have. He said he had learned something about this recently in dealing with his father who has terminal esophageal cancer. His dad joked that there was an upside to it all because in losing 45 pounds he didn't need his blood pressure medication anymore and he had money to save because he couldn't go anywhere to spend it. This made us laugh as we realized how even a little thing like a sense of humor can be a big thing when it comes to dealing with adversity.

We talked about how through the creative use of the imagination that we can begin to see the value of what we do have even though it may not seem like much. George said that studies have been done showing that children on average can think of about ten times more creative things to do with a pencil (like put paper wings on it and make an airplane) than adults. I told the group about my experience tutoring kids with special needs in a technique known as visualizing/verbalizing. One of the girls when asked to describe for me the object she was visualizing would say, "I got nuthin." The reality is that we have immense imaginative capacities that largely lie untapped and unused. George said that God is creative and so are we.

At this point our friend George Hunt said that "I did give up faith in mesself coz some people didn like my drawins" but he was getting back into it with the encouragement of new friends. This led us to talk about the importance of forming friendships with people that would be supportive and not hold us back. I told the group that my son Jon would often say in response to my criticism of things he would do, "Don't be a hater dad." Someone told us that Alexander Graham Bell failed many times before he invented the telephone but that just meant he knew lots of things that didn't work. Our friend Mark said that the man that invented the UPS system of package delivery first submitted his idea in a dissertation for Harvard University but the paper received a failing grade from his professor.

As our conversation moved to a conclusion George told us that everybody has something inside them of great value and that we should believe in it, stick to it, and trust in God. He also encouraged us that we don't have to stay where we are but through vision, imagination, God, and friends the little we have could become a lot more than we might ever imagine. That was a very encouraging message and we all felt empowered by it.