For decades, cities (and countless freight train companies!) around the world have wrestled with the issue of graffiti.  Is it art?  Is it vandalism?  Is it both?  As anyone who has looked at graffiti with a dispassionate eye can attest, some graffiti is indeed art, some very fine art done by some very talented people.  Other graffiti is of course not worth remembering.  It's often an expression of personal displeasure or scorn, fit only to be painted over.

    At its core, however, graffiti is a picture of the human imagination.  And imagination is, by its very nature, the path to what is beyond it.    

    In the story of Jesus' raising of Lazarus, recorded in the eleventh chapter of John's gospel, we read that before Jesus raised the dead Lazarus, he asked one of his sisters, "Did I not say to you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?"  In other words, Martha, let go of what you think and focus on what you believe.  Allow your imagination to run freely, to run even beyond you.

    Clearly, the raising of Lazarus is many miles from the intentions behind graffiti, but they both speak to the same point:  we must learn to look at what we see through the lens of human imagination and the lens of a belief that imagination is only the beginning.

     With our eyes only, we'll never see it all.