When two-year-old Emerald and I play together, we enjoy a variety of simple pleasures: reading books, chasing bubbles, playing piano, drawing with markers. But most fun of all is watching her come up with her own creative “games.”

It was her idea to climb into an empty bathtub with her super-balls and stir them up till they fly around like hail in a hurricane. She does it every time she visits .

And she often asks me to reach for her half-dozen sippy-cups so she can stack them, match them with their appropriate lids, and arrange them in a circle like the numbers on a clock.

Though two-year-olds are total entertainment, maybe it’s more than that. Emerald may grow up to be a visionary, someone who dreams big and tries new things.

The other day she walked into the kitchen (after rummaging through my desk) with my magnifier glasses on her nose. After staring silently for the longest time, she finally just said, “Eyes.”

No doubt she meant, “My eyes can’t see right.” What she saw through them was blurred, but when I offered to take the glasses, she chose to keep them, walking through the house while gently turning her head this way and that to experiment with her new vision. She was fascinated.

Not long ago I had a similar experience but with a non-visionary response. I found a pair of extreme magnifiers at a rummage sale and got a good laugh trying them on. But unlike Emerald’s desire to experience something new, I couldn’t wait to get them off. She pushed through positively; I gave up.

But of course eye-vision is one thing. Being a true visionary is something else. It means believing in an idea so completely that words like impossible, unlikely, or impractical aren’t roadblocks. Visionaries don’t hear even sharp criticism, because their drive to shoot for something fresh and new is so strong.

God knows all about being a visionary. Talk about a vision! His was to save corrupted mankind from sin, an impossible task from our perspective. But he saw through to the end result and ended up accomplishing exactly what he set out to do.

Now, as he offers salvation to each of us, we have to choose whether or not we’ll believe his vision about a sinless future in eternity with him. In a way, that calls for each of us to be a visionary.

We also have to be visionaries about the details. How will things go when we step out of this world and into the next? Since we don’t know for sure, we have to blend God’s word with trust in him. As we do, it’s best not to criticize or worry, which is what non-visionaries do. Instead we should simply “catch God’s vision” and expect that somehow everything is going to work out perfectly.

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” (Proverbs 29:18)