Sometimes fear crushes our imagination.
Nearly 130 years ago two young dreamers named Wilbur and Orville Wright ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. They came from an influential and scholarly family. It appeared that books would be their future, maybe as lawyers, doctors, or scholars. But these siblings were more town than gown, and they couldn’t be pulled away from their shop at 22 South Williams Street.
This was unimaginable because people in this era feared bicycles.
Do you know how far a child could drift from home on a bike? Have you heard about the bad influences in the nearby town?
Cyclists were perceived as unsafe, unwise, and possibly sinful. It was like Uber, AI, and vaping all in one.
The Wrights were even more controversial for their second dream: this bicycle might fly. If someone was nervous about a kid traveling to another county, imagine what they would think about crossing the Atlantic Ocean by air. Not that this mattered, because it wasn’t like these men were actually going to create a contraption that could fly. Not only did most people find the project unlikely, they deemed it scientifically impossible. Birds fly; people do not.
Yet Wilbur and Orville committed themselves to a dream that could change the course of history. One person said that they didn’t just invent flight; they opened up a door to the world.
The image of opening up a door is probably the right one, since they didn’t see that new world for themselves. Wilbur and Orville Wright’s legendary flight was 59 seconds, slightly shorter than the pre-flight safety announcement that tells modern flyers how to buckle a seatbelt and apply an oxygen mask. Their aircraft went 852 feet. Years later, Wilbur once flew as far as 20 miles. He was in the air for 33 minutes. Passengers flying into Atlanta spend more time than that waiting to descend. The Wrights never really appreciated the influence of their work. But millions of others have experienced it now.
David does not build the Temple. But his son does.
Moses does not enter the Promised Land. But Joshua does.
Abraham does not see the blessing to the nations. But Paul does.
Each generation relies on the previous one. Wilbur and Orville could thank Thomas Edison, who was born 20 years earlier and just 170 miles away in Milan, Ohio. Without his 1879 lightbulb, life would be harder for an inventor.
Those who come after us will sustain and expand our work. While the Wrights were testing their new contraption in 1902, Charles Lindbergh was born 200 miles away in Detroit. He would one day fly from New York to Paris.
In 1921 John Glenn would be born in rural Cambridge, 150 miles from the Wright home. He later entered space and orbited the Earth.
In 1930, just 55 miles from the Wright Brothers home, Neil Armstrong was born in tiny Wapakoneta. He walked on the moon.
All it took was a few guys who dreamed to fly.
It’s a good thing they tinkered in that bicycle shop on South Williams Street. The world didn’t need another lawyer; it needed a new dream.
The same is true for us.
Societies die when they stop dreaming. Gabriel García Márquez said, “'It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
Many of us have lost our sense of imagination. We have abandoned our civic imagination, our political imagination, and, especially, our theological imagination.
We have surrendered to anxiety because we have assumed that what has been must always be.
We stop experiencing resurrection and begin believing only in crucifixion. And soon we switch teams and join the Romans in hopes of avoiding martyrdom. Power corrupts.
We start believing that someone else’s success will come at the expense of our own.
We fight over abundant resources as if they are scarce.
We stop making peace and instead resort to violence.
“I worry,” replaces “I wonder.”
Power trumps possibility.
Before long, the church, the country, or the group is trapped in a fearful, anxious system that resembles the worst impulses of the life we are supposed to reject.
Fear overrides faith.
This is a habit that must be resisted.
Fear gets in our muscles and becomes our memory and shapes our responses.
We resist it, but then it returns, like nothing ever changed, and feels totally natural.
Just like riding a bike.
Let’s learn to fly.
“The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.”
-Walter Brueggemann (1933-2025), The Prophetic Imagination
