I saw Alice in Wonderland tonight. It doesn't follow the books -- it's kind of a sequel after Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. But you can learn a lot about life by watching the movie...
"You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret: All of the best people are."
The first scene occurs when Alice is young. She has these dreams that are disturbing to her of unusual things -- like mad hatters and talking rabbits and grinning cats.
She tells her father about these "impossible" things and asks if she is mad. His response? "You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret: All of the best people are...I try to think of at least six impossible things before breakfast."
When Alice goes down the rabbit hole 13 years later, she finds that the "dreams" weren't really dreams. They were memories.
Which made me think. I didn't know what it made me think of at first, but the spectres of something deep and wonderful in the scheme of my everday life that had something to do with this scene kept flying around in my head. I think I finally caught it.
When we're young, we have this sense of wonder. Everything looks bigger. Our dreams are larger. There are monsters in our rooms. Heaven's skies seem to open up when we go to the park, or when Dad lets us borrow the shovel to dig that backyard hole to China.
Then we get older. The environment stays the same, but the world fades into mundanity. We dismiss yesterday's excitement as a time when we were young and immature and didn't have the "real" view of things. Yesterday was a dream -- and now, we are in the real world.
But what if yesterday's grandeur is not a dream, but a memory of reality that we have abandoned?
A lot of us think, act, and talk like God is a dream. Many people (Christians included) have doubts about Him. There's a zillion atheists and agnostics who will say that He's a fairy tale -- a very nice, entertaining fairy tale to some, but a fairy tale just the same. The world isn't nearly as grand as we'd like to think, the doubts proclaim. We are deprived of grandeur; the world is a shade of gray; we as the human race are sentenced to spending our days chasing dust. Alone.
And then -- God comes. And we fall through the "rabbit hole." And all the mundanity disappears. The glimmers of color and light you saw at the corners of the drabness you called "reality" are exposed as the real thing. After death -- the ultimate transformation -- the faith we had in faint dreams overwhelmingly transforms into the reality of sight.
In the meanwhile, we dream the impossible -- that light exists in the darkness, that the brilliance defies the drabness, that love will conquer hate, that death cowers before life, that a perfect God loves you in spite of how small and weak and imperfect you are. We "try to think of at least six impossible things before breakfast."
That makes us appear a bit mad to some people. But I don't think very many want the "sane" world to be the real world. I think that's why we have the built in attraction to the following answer to the question "Am I mad?":
"You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret. All the best people are."
Why God is like a Rabbit
Alice is in a judgmental town, and she's expected to marry someone who is pretty undesirable. But she needs to marry him because, as her mother states, one day her beauty is going to fade. Her chance is going to go away, and she'll be ugly. She needs to marry him NOW, while she still can.
That's like sin. I remember a guy at community college who fancied himself a playboy. He once told his life philosophy -- which was to live for the NOW. He didn't think about tomorrow. He chose to ignore consequences. He wanted to think about NOW.
It's donned on me that this mindset is the foundation of sin. Every temptation to sin advertises one or both of two messages. First, limit thinking that goes outside of yourself -- don't look outside of your personal bubble to see who you might be hurting. Second, limit your view of the future -- don't think about the long term consequences of your actions.
How many times have you heard someone say, "You're only young once! Have a good time while you still can!"?
And yet, when I talk to people who partied their twenties away, they tell me that something didn't feel right about it all. Something seemed a bit "off." Kinda like the way Alice felt when she was pushed to marry someone while she was still young. Something didn't make sense about it.
Now, here's the interesting thing. When the undesirable suitor gets down on one knee to propose to Alice in front of a silent, waiting crowd of hundreds (in one of the most awkward proposal scenes I've ever seen), Alice recites the reasons why she should marry him -- reasons based on time. Soon, she'll get old, she says, and she won't be pretty enough to marry. The fear of time running out -- a missed opportunity -- is what's driving her decision.
The same thing that drives our decision to sin -- the temporary nature of our flesh that says "get satisfaction NOW instead of waiting and possibly missing out"-- is what is driving Alice's decision. At first.
And then the rabbit shows up, behind a bush.
Holding a clock, and pointing to it urgently.
And Alice, forgetting about the ticking clock her mother gave her that would have made her say yes to the undesirable suitor, and forgetting about the "do it now" on the clock that is enblazoned in the minds of the hundreds of onlookers, begins to follow a different clock -- a clock that enables her to run fron the undesirable suitor and enter the world of her wildest dreams, to find that this dreamworld is the reality.
I think God is kind of like that rabbit.
The rest of the world has a clock that they think we should follow -- they have this "do it now or you're missing out on sin" mentality. On a level, because the crowd is looking on and urging us, we want to follow them. But if we listen closer, we'll find that something isn't quite right. And as we listen closer, we find that the clock the world gives us is an illusion -- and in working beyond that illusion, the world starts to fade.
Then we here another sound - a tick-tock that seems more real and hints at our dreams of eternity. And as we glance around to find where the clock is coming from, we catch a hint of God. And then, while the rest of the crowd scratches their heads, we race after the clock He is holding in His Hands...and down the "rabbit hole."
Why Alice Left Wonderland -- and Why We Should, Too
So Alice goes down the rabbit hole. She has a fantastic adventure and, as I stated earlier, finds that her wildest dreams are actually real. This is an epic world -- good and evil fight against each other (in an epicness that is a very, very faint shadow of our own very real cosmic battle). In a David-and-Goliath scene, she cuts off the head of the monster in the movie, the Jabberwocky. She begins to think that she's worth something and is valuable.
Now, here's the thing -- she can stay in Wonderland. Just like we can stay in church, and listen to the beautiful music and sermons. Just like the monk can stay in the monastary or the nun in the convent. It certainly would be more comfortable than the world she left behind.
But she cares enough about the people outside of Wonderland that she wants to bring what she learned in Wonderland back to them. So she returns.
Here's one of the fascinating things: After being in Wonderland, she has no qualms about telling the undesirable suitor "no," or saying several other things to members of the crowd. She begins to be ambitiious in giving business suggestions to the person who would have been her father-in-law. She is bringing Wonderland back to the world she knows. The more confident she is about Wonderland's existence, the more robustly and confidently she can bring back Wonderland to the world that doesn't know Wonderland.
But she had to go to Wonderland first.
In the church, I'm sensitive to two extremes. One is the extreme of being so much in the outside world that it's a crippling struggle to see and rejoice in God. The other is rejoicing in God so much that we aren't bringing God's heaven back to earth.
Like Alice, we need to face the drab worldview of the people who reject the land of wonder that we experience. But it's important to get the experience of being in that land of wonder -- because the more we have the experience, the more courage we will have to bring the wonder we've experienced to those who haven't experienced it.
That's how we can fulfill Jesus' prayer to God that "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." A.W. Tozer said that most important thing about us is our concept of God. That makes sense. The better picture we have of God, the more robust and confident we will be in proclaiming heaven to those who don't know it -- which means that we should be constantly pursuing a better picture of God. Then, as Alice brought back Wonderland to a world that didn't know Wonderland, so we can bring heaven back to a world that doesn't know heaven.
"You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret: All of the best people are."
The first scene occurs when Alice is young. She has these dreams that are disturbing to her of unusual things -- like mad hatters and talking rabbits and grinning cats.
She tells her father about these "impossible" things and asks if she is mad. His response? "You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret: All of the best people are...I try to think of at least six impossible things before breakfast."
When Alice goes down the rabbit hole 13 years later, she finds that the "dreams" weren't really dreams. They were memories.
Which made me think. I didn't know what it made me think of at first, but the spectres of something deep and wonderful in the scheme of my everday life that had something to do with this scene kept flying around in my head. I think I finally caught it.
When we're young, we have this sense of wonder. Everything looks bigger. Our dreams are larger. There are monsters in our rooms. Heaven's skies seem to open up when we go to the park, or when Dad lets us borrow the shovel to dig that backyard hole to China.
Then we get older. The environment stays the same, but the world fades into mundanity. We dismiss yesterday's excitement as a time when we were young and immature and didn't have the "real" view of things. Yesterday was a dream -- and now, we are in the real world.
But what if yesterday's grandeur is not a dream, but a memory of reality that we have abandoned?
A lot of us think, act, and talk like God is a dream. Many people (Christians included) have doubts about Him. There's a zillion atheists and agnostics who will say that He's a fairy tale -- a very nice, entertaining fairy tale to some, but a fairy tale just the same. The world isn't nearly as grand as we'd like to think, the doubts proclaim. We are deprived of grandeur; the world is a shade of gray; we as the human race are sentenced to spending our days chasing dust. Alone.
And then -- God comes. And we fall through the "rabbit hole." And all the mundanity disappears. The glimmers of color and light you saw at the corners of the drabness you called "reality" are exposed as the real thing. After death -- the ultimate transformation -- the faith we had in faint dreams overwhelmingly transforms into the reality of sight.
In the meanwhile, we dream the impossible -- that light exists in the darkness, that the brilliance defies the drabness, that love will conquer hate, that death cowers before life, that a perfect God loves you in spite of how small and weak and imperfect you are. We "try to think of at least six impossible things before breakfast."
That makes us appear a bit mad to some people. But I don't think very many want the "sane" world to be the real world. I think that's why we have the built in attraction to the following answer to the question "Am I mad?":
"You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret. All the best people are."
Why God is like a Rabbit
Alice is in a judgmental town, and she's expected to marry someone who is pretty undesirable. But she needs to marry him because, as her mother states, one day her beauty is going to fade. Her chance is going to go away, and she'll be ugly. She needs to marry him NOW, while she still can.
That's like sin. I remember a guy at community college who fancied himself a playboy. He once told his life philosophy -- which was to live for the NOW. He didn't think about tomorrow. He chose to ignore consequences. He wanted to think about NOW.
It's donned on me that this mindset is the foundation of sin. Every temptation to sin advertises one or both of two messages. First, limit thinking that goes outside of yourself -- don't look outside of your personal bubble to see who you might be hurting. Second, limit your view of the future -- don't think about the long term consequences of your actions.
How many times have you heard someone say, "You're only young once! Have a good time while you still can!"?
And yet, when I talk to people who partied their twenties away, they tell me that something didn't feel right about it all. Something seemed a bit "off." Kinda like the way Alice felt when she was pushed to marry someone while she was still young. Something didn't make sense about it.
Now, here's the interesting thing. When the undesirable suitor gets down on one knee to propose to Alice in front of a silent, waiting crowd of hundreds (in one of the most awkward proposal scenes I've ever seen), Alice recites the reasons why she should marry him -- reasons based on time. Soon, she'll get old, she says, and she won't be pretty enough to marry. The fear of time running out -- a missed opportunity -- is what's driving her decision.
The same thing that drives our decision to sin -- the temporary nature of our flesh that says "get satisfaction NOW instead of waiting and possibly missing out"-- is what is driving Alice's decision. At first.
And then the rabbit shows up, behind a bush.
Holding a clock, and pointing to it urgently.
And Alice, forgetting about the ticking clock her mother gave her that would have made her say yes to the undesirable suitor, and forgetting about the "do it now" on the clock that is enblazoned in the minds of the hundreds of onlookers, begins to follow a different clock -- a clock that enables her to run fron the undesirable suitor and enter the world of her wildest dreams, to find that this dreamworld is the reality.
I think God is kind of like that rabbit.
The rest of the world has a clock that they think we should follow -- they have this "do it now or you're missing out on sin" mentality. On a level, because the crowd is looking on and urging us, we want to follow them. But if we listen closer, we'll find that something isn't quite right. And as we listen closer, we find that the clock the world gives us is an illusion -- and in working beyond that illusion, the world starts to fade.
Then we here another sound - a tick-tock that seems more real and hints at our dreams of eternity. And as we glance around to find where the clock is coming from, we catch a hint of God. And then, while the rest of the crowd scratches their heads, we race after the clock He is holding in His Hands...and down the "rabbit hole."
Why Alice Left Wonderland -- and Why We Should, Too
So Alice goes down the rabbit hole. She has a fantastic adventure and, as I stated earlier, finds that her wildest dreams are actually real. This is an epic world -- good and evil fight against each other (in an epicness that is a very, very faint shadow of our own very real cosmic battle). In a David-and-Goliath scene, she cuts off the head of the monster in the movie, the Jabberwocky. She begins to think that she's worth something and is valuable.
Now, here's the thing -- she can stay in Wonderland. Just like we can stay in church, and listen to the beautiful music and sermons. Just like the monk can stay in the monastary or the nun in the convent. It certainly would be more comfortable than the world she left behind.
But she cares enough about the people outside of Wonderland that she wants to bring what she learned in Wonderland back to them. So she returns.
Here's one of the fascinating things: After being in Wonderland, she has no qualms about telling the undesirable suitor "no," or saying several other things to members of the crowd. She begins to be ambitiious in giving business suggestions to the person who would have been her father-in-law. She is bringing Wonderland back to the world she knows. The more confident she is about Wonderland's existence, the more robustly and confidently she can bring back Wonderland to the world that doesn't know Wonderland.
But she had to go to Wonderland first.
In the church, I'm sensitive to two extremes. One is the extreme of being so much in the outside world that it's a crippling struggle to see and rejoice in God. The other is rejoicing in God so much that we aren't bringing God's heaven back to earth.
Like Alice, we need to face the drab worldview of the people who reject the land of wonder that we experience. But it's important to get the experience of being in that land of wonder -- because the more we have the experience, the more courage we will have to bring the wonder we've experienced to those who haven't experienced it.
That's how we can fulfill Jesus' prayer to God that "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." A.W. Tozer said that most important thing about us is our concept of God. That makes sense. The better picture we have of God, the more robust and confident we will be in proclaiming heaven to those who don't know it -- which means that we should be constantly pursuing a better picture of God. Then, as Alice brought back Wonderland to a world that didn't know Wonderland, so we can bring heaven back to a world that doesn't know heaven.
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