My mother imagined great things for all five of her children and her support knew no bounds. In high school my younger sibs showed great promise for careers in architecture, medicine, health care, and engineering. My only talent was cartooning and I spent hours copying drawings from Superman and Lone Ranger comic books. Mom chose to think of these scratchings as art. We visited an art museum once and she stared critically at a painting by Pablo Picasso. Mom looked at me and declared loudly, “You can do better than that!”

Sometimes Mom personified Picasso’s own adage, “Todo lo que puedas imiginar es real” – anything you can imagine is real. I thought of her loving but vast overestimation of my art recently when I cartooned a fake Picasso to illustrate a blog about how God’s messages are sometimes hard to read.

Needless to say, I am no Picasso. But both Picasso and Mom believed that even the most unattainable aspirations are never silly.  And anything you can imagine may take on a reality no one else can see.