I come from a family of worriers. Recently, while looking through old family photos, I noticed that the same frown lines marking my forehead appear on many of my kinfolk. We are thinkers and imaginative people. We can look at the events of the world and, almost reflexively, imagine the worst possible outcome. I’m not proud of it, but it is true.

This week, I came across a line that has stayed with me: “Worry is a misuse of your imagination.” I had never thought about worry that way. Human beings possess a remarkable capacity to imagine what does not yet exist. Genesis says we are created “in the image of God.” Part of bearing that image is reflecting God’s creative, life-giving purposes in the world.

Unfortunately, imagination can also be turned in destructive directions. Human history offers more than enough evidence of what happens when creativity is placed in the service of hatred, greed, and violence. However, we need not look to history’s worst atrocities to see the danger. Sometimes imagination simply becomes worry. Worry imagines a future in which fear gets the final word before the future has even arrived.

As another contentious election season unfolds, messages of fear fill our televisions, computers, and phones. Fear is persuasive. If someone can convince us that the future is dangerous enough, we become easier to manipulate toward a product, a position, or a candidate. I hear that same anxiety creeping into conversations in the pews before worship on Sunday.

Frederick Buechner wrote often about the importance of imagination for faith. He urged Christians to look at the world with more than their eyes—to enter another person’s experience and see what might otherwise remain hidden. “The highest work of the imagination,” he wrote, “is to have eyes like that.”

Perhaps one of the church’s great challenges is not a lack of information, but a failure of imagination. We can become so accustomed to the world as it is that we stop dreaming about the world as Christ intends it to be.

A sanctified imagination—an imagination shaped by Jesus—learns to envision communities marked by forgiveness, hope, healing, generosity, and love. Such an imagination is not naïve about corruption, suffering, or evil. It simply refuses to let fear have the final word. It becomes captivated by a different vision and anchored in the peace of Christ.

Paul writes, “Do not worry about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” Then comes the promise: God’s peace will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:6-7).

When I look at my children, I want to exchange my worry lines for crow’s feet at the corners of my eyes. I want them to remember smiles and laughter more than furrowed brows. I want them to inherit the joy of possibility and a vision of a world filled with the peace and love of Christ.

Our imaginations will help shape the future we pass down. Let us use those imaginations well.