For those of us who are baby boomers, we remember the night of December 8, 1980. John Lennon, the former Beatle and an enduring icon to many of us, fell to an assassin's bullet outside of his apartment in New York City.  As those of the "Greatest Generation" remember December 7, 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the momentous changes it unleashed on millions and millions of people, as the Millennials remember the darkness of September 11, 2001, so we remember December 8th.
     I've listened to Lennon's classic "Imagine" more times than I can count.  Though I look at it differently than I did on the other side of my embrace of Jesus and Christianity, I still marvel at the simplicity of its vision.  Though religious people may quarrel with "Imagine's" focus on the things of this world to the exclusion and detriment of things beyond it, we should, I say, identify with its passion to imagine what we do not now see. While Lennon did not see world peace at the time he wrote the song, he nonetheless longed for it and, it seemed, believed it would one day happen.  Similarly, most religions, Christianity and Islam and Judaism in particular, though they do not now see the fullness of that for which they long, nonetheless believe that one day they will.  We all long, we all imagine.  We all wish for a better world.
     We all dream of peace.  Before we experience it, however, we must imagine--and believe--it will happen.  For it will.  In the end, peace will be a work of human endeavor undergirded and sustained by the fact and activity of God.  Humanness craves it, God guarantees it.
     Imagine.