O Lord, you have searched me and known me … and in your book every one of my days is written before they ever come to pass (Psalms 139:1, 16).

I grew up in a house that looked like a miniature library. My parents believed that reading was a kind of sacred exercise and experience into which they were obligated to initiate us. The outcome of this literary crusade was that I – like many in the pre-internet generation – spent large swaths of my life in various imaginary worlds. In addition to classic adventure stories – Robinson Crusoe, Sherlock Holmes, Jules Verne, Winnie-the-Pooh (my first and favorite) – I entered what was to me an even more fascinating realm: the world of history, geography, and biography. Mark Twain, Jackie Robinson, Josef Stalin, Abraham Lincoln, Amelia Earhart, volumes of American Heritage, National Geographic, and various picture versions of world events all helped to populate my alternate mental universe.

Late-night, under-the-covers-with-a-flashlight book time wasn’t an escape from some terrible childhood. Mine was quite normal, and mostly as peaceful as a seven-member (not including non-humans) household could hope to be. For me, every story provided a means to insert myself into realities that I could manipulate and control, and spaces where I could inhabit the role of my choosing, even to the point of having a crush on certain female fictional characters.

I know that my reading habits were neither remarkable nor weird – they do not mark me either as a genius or a sociopath. I mention them because they are absolutely ordinary forays into the same, or similar fantasies that occupy the mind of nearly all adolescents. They are part of figuring out what we want to be “when we grow up” – what we can, can’t (I’m still waiting for a call from some NFL coach or another), should, or ought not to pursue.

But funny things happen on the way to adulthood. We rightly leave some of our fanciful thinking behind (see the NFL reference, above). Sometimes we forsake legitimate and even God-given promptings out of fear or deception about what he is able to do in us. Some fantasies stick to us, and some fantasies we get stuck in. Any and all of these occurrences have the potential to rise up against us in our more “mature” years.

Many of our struggles with sin and temptation arise from these stuck or abandoned places of our younger selves. Our encounters with other persons (friends, family, pastors, teachers, bosses), with school and church, with ideas and movements in our culture, with money, sex, power, desires of every kind all provide formative data that become frozen in our hearts, minds, and spirits. They become “thought traps” – land mines to which we return when we face conflicts, decisions, struggles, at various stages and moments of our lives. Most of us have familiar stumbling blocks, well-tailored to our individual vulnerabilities. They often follow a well-worn path set out by a little triad of disappointment, regret, and what-if.

There is a trap for husbands and wives when they hit the occasional marriage wall. Surmounting or tearing down walls takes real work – labor done early and often. When we neglect, ignore, or become indifferent to our promises and to love itself, the poison advances steadily into our relationship. He has disappointed me; she isn’t meeting my needs; we aren’t completing each other anymore (all evidence of idols in the house). Maybe I made a mistake here. After all, there were other opportunities – I remember (fill in the blank). What would life have been with him, with her? Since he or she is not (usually) available, there might well be another option around. And an adultery is born …

There is a trap for employees at their jobs and Christians in their service. How’s the boss treating you these days? Are you feeling frustrated with ministry? Look how well others seem to be doing at work or in using their spiritual gifts. Are you tempted to engage in the comparison with fellow-believers?

Remember that these situations of vulnerability don’t exist in a vacuum, but connect to those experiences and habits that we formed in our younger years. The imaginative and behavioral refuges to which we flee as adults have their sources and gain power from what we saw, heard, and thought while growing up in our families and the environments of our young years. So, for example, when we confront challenges in our marriage, there is a confluence of vision, expectation, and real-life encounters that forms our responses. What was our parents’ relationship like? Were we prone to living in a Romantic idealization of the him or her of our dreams? What do we believe our spouse should be or provide for us?

We can become mired in the same species of prior-life formation in any arena of existence: Did you grow up with a drive to please, or to rebel against authority; to idealize or scorn work and service; to co-dependency or isolation in relationships? Did you (as I did) receive unreasonable and unseasonable expectations and standards – whether moral, intellectual, or relational – that your failure to live up to festered as regret, striving, or rebellion?

Any of these memory points, even when they hover in the far background of our minds, can become the poisonous consolations that we use to escape the everyday reality of circumstances that draw out our (and others’) varied and various frailties. We create landscapes, inhabited by Walter Mitty-like caricatures of ourselves, our families and friends, out history, our failures and humiliations, our successes and triumphs – all prone to revisions that suit the positive or negative narratives that we believe are, or should be the real us. We are men and women who come face to face with a distorted Picasso picture of life. and we work our reconstructive magic. There must be something better, we must be someone better (or worse, if we have bought the lie of a cursed life).

Clearly, the “harmless” daydream is not. It is no wonder that pornography has become so pervasive; that Hollywood produces approximately 20 superhero movies every year; or that social media sites – some of the ultimate purveyors of fantasy worlds – dominate modern communication. Each of these (sometimes contradictory) trends is an answer to human lives looking in the wrong places for meaning. They mirror the inner discomfort we have with the call to expose and surrender the real me to the beauty and power of the true God. But it is this act of vulnerable faith that is our only means of healing, freedom, and fruitfulness. Faith calls us out of both the curse and the self-generated blessing. Three things that we can meditate on as we hear this call:

First, the Spirit will lead us into the contentment that comes from a grateful acceptance of reality. When I struggle with regret and travel to my why-didn’t or what-if world, I am acting in denial of who I truly am (the one who did or said “those things”) and of the present circumstances that my decisions have led to. It’s telling that it is never the Holy Spirit who leads me into regret’s falsehoods. On the contrary, when God takes me to the past, it is to open a picture of True Me, to lead me into identifying with that Me and into repentance. In this way, he then can more fully take my rubble and build kingdom

Second, Jesus will awaken in us the gift of God’s own zeal for transforming us and using us for his kingdom. When I see present dysfunction – mine or (especially) yours – and its links to past sources, I so want to fix it. I am a big fan of DIY spirituality. But my desire never matches either the understanding or power needed to repair the broken places. The Lord’s plans are always greater, deeper, and, at the same time, more patient and realistic than mine. It is better for me to put aside my blueprints, to “cease striving and know that he is God” (Psalms 46:10).

Third – and most amazingly – the Father will cause us to walk in the present grace of adoption. What we most need is a divine reformation in the unformed and deformed places, and the fantasy worlds that we draw because we were and are disconnected from the reality of his love and care. We have heard and believed many lies: You are your own person; you can do anything you set your mind to; you are worthless will amount to nothing; work, marriage, money, pleasure are the answers to the questions of identity and value; you deserve health, wealth, beauty, and the latest kitchen gadgets; God is not fully trustworthy …

Above the dissonance of all the lies, the Spirit, crying “Abba,” calls us to immerse ourselves in and surrender to his present goodness and to the remembrance of past blessing. In the confluence of what the Lord has done and what he is doing is healing of our rebellion, the lessening of distance, the correcting of deception, and a flourishing of hope for his good future.

No more chasing our Walter Mitty or Anne of Green Gables fantasies. The Father’s reality is the eternal, joyful, blessed and satisfying fulfillment of what true dreams look like.