Where The Mind Goes First

I've been sitting with the thought that our feet will never take us where our mind has never gone since I returned from the Dominican Republic last week. I have been sitting with it, turning it over the way you turn over a stone you picked up on a walk and can't bring yourself to put down. The more I hold it, the more convinced I become that imagination, or what so many of us in the church call vision, is the vehicle God gave us to travel into the future. Essentially, before anything arrives in our hands, it has to arrive in our minds.

And yet so many of us have let that vehicle sit in the garage until the tires went flat. On the one hand, school teaches us to color inside the lines and fill in the right bubble. On the other hand, bills, heartbreak, and disappointment teach us to expect less so we will hurt less. And, as a result, little by little, life rubs the imagination out of us, and we start calling that maturity.

I want to make a case for getting it back.

Barney Was Real to Me

When I was a little girl on the South Side of Chicago, I loved Barney. The theme song was honest with us from the very first note: "Barney is a dinosaur from our imagination, and when he's tall, he's what we call a dinosaur sensation." In other words, Barney was a stuffed toy that only came alive when children believed hard enough. Did the adults watching know he was pretend? Yes, but I didn't know and didn't care.

Barney was real to me.

I know some people might get uneasy here because in many Christian circles, imaginary friends are dismissed as childish make-believe, and some go further and call them spiritually dangerous. I understand where that caution comes from, and I am not here to argue the theology of a purple dinosaur. What stays with me is the seeing. Children everywhere looked at a toy and saw a friend, and that capacity to see what is not yet visible is the very capacity faith asks us to keep.

Looking back, I understand that the show was teaching me something far bigger than songs about sharing and brushing my teeth. Every episode began with something ordinary, a toy sitting on a shelf, and ended with that ordinary thing transformed because a child decided to see more than what was in front of her. In other words, Barney taught me that imagination has creative power, and that what I could picture had a way of stepping off the shelf and into the room. While I did not have the language for it then, I was learning how to use my mind to shape my reality.

A Life Spent in Imaginary Worlds

It makes a certain kind of sense, then, that I grew up and earned my degrees in African American literature with a specialization in science fiction. From my perspective, science fiction is the literature of imagination because it asks what could be, then builds an entire world to answer the question. For Black writers in particular, imagining a future was itself an act of faith, because so much of our history told us there would be no future for us at all. Many of you know that as an academic, I spent a decade studying Octavia E. Butler, and one of the things that moved me most in her papers was how she wrote her future down before it came. She filled pages with declarations about the books she would publish and the life she would live, and she closed them with a charge to herself: "So be it! See to it!" In this vein, Butler understood what Barney taught me as a child, which is that you have to see it before you can be it, and then you have to go to work.

Butler's own worlds are built the same way. In Wild Seed (1980) and Mind of My Mind (1979), she imagined Doro, an ancient spirit who leaps from body to body across centuries, breeding people with extraordinary gifts. In Dawn (1987), she imagined Lilith waking up aboard an alien ship after humanity has nearly destroyed itself. In Parable of the Sower (1993), she imagined Lauren Olamina, a teenage girl in a collapsing California who writes down a new faith verse by verse, the faith she calls Earthseed, whose central truth is that God is Change. Lauren carries that notebook through fire and loss, and the vision she writes on its pages becomes the foundation of a community. In reality, Habakkuk would have recognized her.

My own scholarship lives inside those worlds. In my work on Mind of My Mind, I read Mary's Pattern, the telepathic web she uses to bind her people together, as a form of what I call speculative literacy. Butler's body of work shows that she imagined new ways for Black people to read, know, and pass down knowledge, through minds, memory, and touch, beyond the written forms that were once withheld from our ancestors by law. In my article on Butler's story "The Evening and the Morning and the Night," forthcoming this month, I read a group of characters living with a hereditary illness and found a story about healing justice and creative care, about people who turn the very thing that threatens them into a source of innovation.

People sometimes tease literary critics for reading things into a text, and honestly, they are right but that is the job. A critic looks at the words on the page and draws out what lives beneath them: the pattern, the silence, the symbol, and the question the author planted and never answered out loud. In essence, interpretation is an act of imagination with discipline behind it. You look at a telepathic web and see a theory of Black literacy. You look at an illness and see a blueprint for care. It is the same thing I did as a child when I looked at a stuffed toy and saw a friend.

The meaning was there, waiting for someone willing to see it.

What I Drew on Punishment

When I was on punishment as a kid, stuck in my room with no TV and nowhere to go, I would draw. I drew girls in stylish outfits with all kinds of hairstyles: long and sleek, big and curly, braided, colored, and cut. I filled pages with them and at the time, I thought I was just passing the time.

Today I am a full-time wig influencer. I spend my days styling hair, putting together looks, and creating content, and I have partnered with well-known brands on collaborations I could never have planned for. It's funny because the little girl sitting on her bedroom floor with a pencil had no idea she was sketching her future, but she was. I say that to say, none of what I am living now could have come to pass if I had not first imagined it, long before I knew it was possible and long before anyone else could see it.

Since some of you have been with me since 2022 and 2023, you remember what I used to say over and over: I want to try on wigs and travel. I said it so often it became a kind of refrain but today I do exactly that. I try on wigs for a living, and I travel. So far this year, I've been to Colombia, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic (my Q4 trip is already booked), and several other domestic locations. I tell you this because the words I kept speaking out loud to you were the vision written plain, and I watched it come to pass in front of the same people who heard me say it.

I want to say something specific about what imagination means to a child growing up in poverty, though. I was born and raised in Englewood, on the South Side of Chicago, where the world can feel very small and the options can look very few. When money was short, almost everything got rationed: clothes, food, trips, and opportunities, but imagination is the one thing no one could ration. A little girl who cannot afford the outfits in the magazines can still draw them, which I did. A child who has never left her neighborhood can still picture herself boarding a plane, which I did. For a poor child, imagination was the first place I got to practice abundance, and that practice matters, because you have to be able to see a different life before you can believe you are allowed to have one.

So every step that brought me here began in that same place. Whether it was leaving Chicago for school, earning my degrees, standing in front of a classroom as a professor, walking away from academia to build something of my own, or stepping in front of a camera with a new unit and a new city behind me, each of those started as a picture in my mind long before it was a reality in my life.

While my circumstances told me one story about who I would become, my imagination told me another, and I chose to follow it.

What the Word Says About Vision

What' s interesting is that scripture has been saying this all along. For instance, Proverbs 29:18 tells us, "Where there is no vision, the people perish." Why? Because people without vision have nothing pulling them forward, and whatever stops moving forward begins to die.

Another example is when the prophet Habakkuk was waiting on God, and the Lord answered him with instructions: "Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it. For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come" (Habakkuk 2:2–3). In this vein, my childhood drawings were my tables, so I was writing the vision before I could read the season I was in.

Hebrews 11:1 calls faith "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." If you don't know, faith and imagination share a muscle because both require us to see what is not yet visible and to treat it as real. Paul describes God as one who "calleth those things which be not as though they were" (Romans 4:17), and we are made in that image so when we imagine, we are practicing a holy habit.

And when we worry that our dreams are too big, Ephesians 3:20 reminds us that God is able to do "exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think." Notice that last word. God works with what we think, and then goes beyond it. So our imagination gives Him somewhere to start.

Becoming as Little Children Again

We know that Jesus told His disciples that unless they became as little children, they would not enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 18:3). While I can go on and on about the kingdom, I have come to believe part of what He meant is this: children still know how to see what isn't there yet because they haven't been talked out of it.

So this is my invitation to you.

Go find the version of yourself who believed the dinosaur was real. Pick up the pencil again and write the vision and make it plain, even if it feels childish, and even if no one around you can see it yet. And remember, God promised through the prophet Joel that He would pour out His Spirit so that our old men would dream dreams and our young men would see visions (Joel 2:28). Here, dreaming was never meant to end with childhood.

Your feet will never take you where your mind has never gone.

So let your mind go first.