Finding God in Flights of Fancy; Part 1.

Why the Fascination?

   I read. A lot. And a lot of a specific genre. I also watch a lot of movies and television shows within this same genre. Yes, I fall in the 10% of Syfy Channel's female viewership. From the time I was old enough to understand sentences, my parents read books to me. From the time I was old enough to really listen, I memorized my favorites and pretended I was really reading (books like Are You my Mother? and The Star Bellied Sneetches by Dr. Seuss were the order of the day back then.) By the time I had my own bed--graduated from the crib--I had my own book shelf as well, full of wonderful picture books, including a Precious Moments illustrated bible, a large-print copy of Hans Christian Andersen's greatest works, an extensive collection of Dr. Seuss and Bill Peet, and, my favorite, Jane and the Dragon. (Yes, I get to blame my parents for my Fantasty/Science Fiction problem. We all know I love it though, so thanks, Mom and Dad!)

   While the imaginative minds of Dr. Seuss and Bill Peet might have helped push my desires to the extra fantastic, I am not alone in having a fascination with stories wrought in other worlds. In fact, I think we'd be very hard pressed to find someone who doesn't enjoy at least one of the Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars, or the Twilight Saga (yes, even that). Or at the very least, who didn't grow up enjoying fairy tales or knights of the round table, reading comic books or acting out the slaying of evil super villains. And let's be real here, video games--ALL video games--have taken stepping out of our world and into another to a whole new, and mainstream, level. Each of us, in whatever individual capacity, is inexorably drawn to the fantastic and to the otherworldly.

   What is that about? 

   When I was younger my friends and I used to joke about this as our escapist tendencies. We looked around us and found the world boring and cruel (we were very angsty pre-teens and teenagers), so we buried our noses in books that gave us black and white battles between good and evil and watched anime upon anime featuring kids saving their universes in the company of talking cats and giant robots. As we grew up and out of teenage dramas, we came face to face with the fact that while much of our previous aches and pains had been created, the world really wasn't the prettiest place we could be living in. As adults (if we are so lucky to be sheltered this long), we are confronted with real hurt, real pain. Is running from this what drives us to the fantasy of other worlds? Are we really, constantly, living the escapism of my teenage years every time we gather for a midnight showing of Harry Potter?

   The problem with calling our inclination to the fantastic escapism is that it suggest a bad habit. Escapism is, can we agree, something not entirely healthy; escapism, a tactic to ignore that which makes us hurt, is something to be avoided. The healthy response to a realization that we are simply tuning out the bad in favor of ignorance of it is to turn off the "distraction" and return to the "real world." Put away your novels, turn off the television, come back from your daydreams of a better place, and sink your teeth into the gritty reality, whatever yours may be. And once you have identified what it is that is making you run away, confront it, and then, well... then, be happy. Be happy in the materialism, the bitter sniping comments, the wars going on around the globe, the children being sold into slavery, the high schoolers selling drugs to each other in a desperate attempt to forget how much life sucks at home. Escapism suggest we are just running away from all of this. Escapism suggests that we are supposed to somehow be okay living in this mess.

   It just isn't true. 

   And, don't get me wrong; this world is full of beautiful things and beautiful people. I will be the first person to tell you that every situation has a gleam of hope and every person has a light and a beauty just waiting to burst forth. Most of my writing will center around these things, because I believe there is far too much concentration on the dark and far too few lighthouses in the midst of all of it. But think carefully: in any of those glorious moments, those good and joyful things, is there not still a longing, a something left unfulfilled? A something that, after the initial joy (be it a moment, a week, or a year) we calm down into the day-to-day and again are seeking something else? We run after whatever things seem to raise a positive flare in our lives, seeking to fill some hole we didn't notice growing along with our bodies and our minds.

   This hole, this desire that we cannot quite name... I believe it is this, not escapism, that attracts us to the fantastic. It is not a running away from the bad, but a running towards the good that we know deep within us we were created for. I think C.S. Lewis, and after him Brooke Fraser, put what I am trying to say best: "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, I can only conclude that I was not made for here." (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Brooke Fraser, "CS Lewis Song.) We were not made for the world as we know it.

   When we dive into Rivendell, into epic tales of knights rescuing damsels and mages destroying demons, we may be ignoring reality for a minute, but instead of running away, what we are doing is seeking to feed our souls with little glimpses of another world we know we were built for. Our hearts know in their depths the purpose and the glory that the creator of the universe intended for us and they know that this, even in the beautiful moments of joy and love and friendship, is just a shadow of the real world that we are destined for. Our souls long for, cry out for, the kingdom that is to come. 

   We were created to be in a place of perfect communion with God, walking, as Adam and Eve were initially, in simple friendship with our Father. Cast out of the garden, after the first fatal choice made between something of the world and God, we attempted to make of the world the same home that God had crafted for us, but can never achieve the same end. And once God found a people willing to choose him once again, in Abraham and Sarah, in their children, His people "lived like strangers in a foreign country... For they were looking forward to the city with foundations whose architect and builder is God... And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If what they had been thinking of was the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country--a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them." (Hebrews 11:6-16) 

   And our deeper eternal purpose has been expanded into the multitudes by Christ's coming, death, and resurrection. Through him, even though we still walk on this planet, interact with and have the opportunity to be a part of all the doings of the people of the world, we no longer simply yearn for a heavenly place, but now we are not even a part of the same world. In John 17:14-16, Jesus prays "I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it." We are not made of the same stuff as the earth and we are not made for the purpose of being here. We are pilgrims and aliens, living within but not becoming of, a foreign land. There is a city built by God that beckons us; our hearts wait eagerly for the opportunity to reside there.

   But until then, we seek encouragement that the kingdom is here, now, even amidst the evil that runs rampant in our world. Until then, we continually seek out glimpses in the form of other things. I do not believe that any author or screenwriter has come close to capturing the kingdom of God, even those who have tried. But what I do know is that more than in any other genre I have read, authors of fairy tales, fantasy, and science fiction use their invented worlds, their grandiose imaginative prefaces, to reveal the inner spirit of what it means to be human and what it means to truly love, both of which are rooted in God. Its almost ironic that in order to catch glimpses of the true nobility of humanity we turn to stories that weave elves and aliens as our counterparts, to be reminded of how much love really matters we read about robots who may or may not feel at all, to satisfy, for a moment, the longing in our soul for real immediate relationship with our God we laugh at the impertinent relationships characters have with their created gods. I do not claim that any novel can bring us closer to the Lord than He can himself. Neither through this do I mean that in response to the pain of the world we should hide in fiction to bolster our bleeding souls. I simply theorize the why of our attraction and preface my forthcoming "Finding God in Flights of Fancy" posts with these thoughts.

   For "now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face." (1 Corinthians 13:12)

[Possible Finding God in Flights of Fancy things to expect in the future: Things to expect from the future: understanding kingship, being a lady--strong but gentle, standing up against the powers and principalities without Jesus (aka, how much that would suck), and... whatever else God reads to me!]

Standing,

against powers and principalities.
together.
firm on my identity.
at the foot of the throne.
still.
strong on my 2 x 2 square of dirt.
on Christ the solid rock.
against the wind, and the rain, and the crashing waves.
in awe.
after having done everything else, just.
in freedom from the chains of bondage.
in Christ alone.

For it is only in his power that I can even find my feet, find my heart able to raise its head within my chest, find my soul a place to dwell, and find my hands a hand to still them. There is too much here for one writing and too little cohesion currently for more. I need a day full of silence with the Lord to allow everything that has been building up in my head to spill out on paper and in paint. Paper actually being a keyboard and text document. Paint... being paint.

No power of hell, no scheme of man,
could ever pluck me from His hand.
'til He returns or calls me home, 
Here in the power of Christ I'll stand.

Being Fed

   Today, after work, I was supposed to drive over to Oak Park to meet with Mr. Tran, my fifth grade student's dad, to work out a new tutoring schedule for this school year, as we start back up after a month long break for vacation.

   As I pull up to their house, Hau's middle-older sister peeks her head out the door, waves, and disappears inside. As I'm parking, Hau scampers down the sidewalk between the brick red paving stones that serve as their front lawn and puts his face to the passenger side window of my car.
   "Hey bud, I missed you! How are you, how was Arizona?"
   "Good, good. My dad didn't tell me we were tutoring today!"
   "Oh, well that's fine, because we're not. He and I are just meeting up to talk about what we want the tutoring schedule to look like for this year."
   "...my dad's out eating lobster right now." The lobster would come back up multiple times in the next hour. Something about it being lobster was very peculiar/important to all the family members.
   "Oh. Okay.... welll... I guess you can just have him call me then," as his face is mixing between acceptance and hope and disappointment and he's just standing there. "...unless you want to tutor today?"
   "Yeah! You can check my homework and then we can read!" Me, blinking, brain trying to catch up to what's happening here.
   "Well, okay, but I didn't bring any of our books with me..."
   "That's fine! I have my book. And I'm onto SIXTH GRADE math now; I finished the fifth grade book. And you can check my homework and make sure I did it okay. And then we can read my book, cuz I didn't get to read it while I was in Arizona, so we should read it."

   A year ago, I was bribing this fourth grader to memorize his alphabet. This is the fourth grader who would only do what I asked because he knew that if he behaved we would read an article about the Chargers together at the end of tutoring. And then when we got there, who demanded I help him through every sentence. Who I had to continuously battle with over quitting early so that he could watch My Babysitter's a Vampire or whatever sporting event his dad was yelling about in the room next door.

   This is the graduated-from-fourth-grader who no more than three months ago sat in a room with me in sullen silence for 45 minutes, refusing to open his life science work book, look me in the eye, or explain to me why he was so furious he was crying. And who then explained to me how incredibly much he hates science (an hour after he had been proclaiming the awesomeness of molecules and debating with me about the reality of matter), which really meant he hated staring at the cal-state science-prep full page essays which his second-language English wasn't strong enough to wade through and his endurance of his dad's desire to push him, failing.

   And today, as I was talking to his mom before leaving, he asks me if I still have the phonics book from the 1930s that I'd been making him learn his sounds from over the summer. Because "You want to keep working on phonics, Hau?" "Yeah, and those other word books too! My teacher says he has really seen an improvement because I can read better now."

   Jesus Christ, Lord of Lord, my life for these days. All the pain and frustration and obnoxious days of warring against 4th-grade-boy-ADD, for today. Thank you, father, for knowing us, knowing what we need, and for feeding us when you know our strength is failing. I cannot get enough of you and what you do.

Response Driven

I find myself contemplating the need to extricate myself from social networking, from facebook and twitter and tumblr, though each for different specific reasons, all for a general concept.
I am made by and defined by and live in Christ. But when I feel needy or miserable or excited or frustrated or sad it is as if it isn't enough to simply share it with Him; I additionally take it to the wide wide world of the internet for validation. As someone who acknowledges and accepts that she is in large part an external processor, this didn't use to bother me (this concept that I feel the need to share an experience, thought, or moment with someone else in order for it to matter/be real/actually have happened.) There's something very relational about this and relationships are what matter to me. And God has built us to be that way, in community with one another, sharing our hopes and fear and joys and distresses with one another. I think the hitch is that living in and sharing with community is different than flinging our cares abroad.
And that is what the internet is: an opportunity for us to fling our thoughts and feelings abroad, letting them drift down to be received or fall between the cracks. (As I write this I continuously consider whether it ought to belong in a journal rather than a blog.) But when we fling them, we have a small (or rather large) piece of us inside that simply sits and waits to be responded to. We wait for a mass of people each wandering in their own worlds, having their own revelations, their own struggles, their own late night heartbreaks and hurts, to suddenly cast their gaze upon ours and respond with the depth of a true friend. We pretend it isn't so, that we write for ourselves, share for the joy of others knowing, but we--I--must acknowledge that we are seeking to be responded to. We are seeking a voice that calls out and says "Yes! You are worth my time and effort!"
But He has already said that.
He has already said that in the loudest voice possible, a voice that shook the earth, eclipsed the sun, and tore the veil. With the agony of His death, Jesus reached out to like every status and reblog every post and reply to every tweet and, ultimately, cry out against their necessity. That may sound blasphemous, or at least ridiculous, to account the Christ's blood as a social media click, but He is in and has accounted for even the tiniest things. And this is how we think now, in these media messages.
I want the blood of the Lamb to wipe out all of those messages.
I want my God to be the only server I turn to when I need to shout my joy, anguish, pleasure, or distress. Not simply the first, but the only. He and His angels, his servants here on this earth, who he has blessed me with. These women, and a few men, have changed my life into a life I can envision standing before the king, casting off the cares of this world, and dancing with abandon, rather than bowed heavy with the weight of shame and sorrow and apology.
Oughtn't we to cast off the things that make us ache for a validation outside of the glory of the King?
We house the fullness of God, who is the creator of the universe, our bridegroom, brother, and father, who is the judge of all good and evil in the world, the mighty healer, the compassionate and wrathful warrior, and the most merciful existence. And He loves. Me. Specifically. and YOU, specifically.
He loves me.
What is a facebook status like in comparison with that?

Radio Silence

I haven't written in this blog since July. I'd like to change that, since writing here requires me to actually sit down and think full thoughts, craft the way I write them, and organize my brain-spew (in contrast to tumblr which consists entirely of brain-spew and impulsive reblogging of all my input). It would be good to get back in the habit of blogging before starting school again (Bethel in January!) and while gearing up to lead a life group (hopefully ministering to refugees in City Heights) and have co-ownership/responsibility for the 180 Exp Tutoring Program at Kearny with Andrew. I have very little to say at this current time because it is late and I am not thinking full thoughts. Just a heads up that I want to return to writing; if there's anything anyone out there would be interested in reading my writing about, please let me know!