Other-Worldly Sight

Just pondering what we've been talking about in our Culture of Honor study lately. Isn't it interesting how God works things together? While we've been doing this study, our family has just started watching a show that I kinda recommend (guardedly, as we're not too far through it yet) - Once Upon a Time. The show is intriguing because it tells your typical fairytale stories, but with a twist.

It seems that a curse cast by the evil witch-queen in Snow White has sent all of the fantasy characters from your favorite Disney stories into our reality. They have their own town, which they cannot leave (Storybrooke) and they each - pixies, fairies and grasshoppers included - are human as the day is long, with lives quite dissimilar to those they lived in storybook land.

The biggest twist, however, shows how they fit into our study. You see, none of them (save a few, such as the evil queen) remember who they were in the stories before their transmutation into the mundane "real" world in which we live. Their realities now look eerily like our own, but they all feel a sense of dysphoria, somehow sensing that their current reality is just not quite right. All of the characters are shuffled about in different relationships, their personalities strive to emerge from the bounds of the new life they are in. But more importantly, they have lost something of what they once were - the goodness or bravery or nobility or craft that they held formerly has been twisted, deformed, stunted.

How oddly like us they are. And how interesting that someone should write such a story, as if to indicate that we all have some sense of dysphoria in this life - like we were made for something wholly other than where we are and what we are doing. C.S. Lewis stated it like this:

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” 

It should not surprise us that we ultimately put our fairytale princes and princesses in such precarious positions as those in which we find ourselves. We cannot hide the dissatisfaction within ourselves. We were certainly made for something more, for something better, than to simply end up a worthless equation of time+matter+chance. 

I believe those who come into Christ - and are willing to let Him abide in them, and they in He -  come into the one place where they can most be themselves. They, under the influence of the Spirit of Creation, can be transformed into exactly who it is that they were supposed to have been in the first place. It is not, in this case, that they are from another world and need to remember it. It is, however, that they have fallen from how God remembers them from the Creation of the world - how He intended us to be. Therefore, we must remember, or be reminded from the mind of God, who we really are. And though we still see dimly, as through darkened glass, we must strive by faith, not by sight, to walk in that image, even though it clashes with this world, this present darkness.

 "He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end." Ecclesiastes 3:11 

Time and will are the keys. We cede our will to the One who shapes us. And then we wait - actively. We work and we learn and we make mistakes...but we always try to act like the image of the One who is shaping us into His own fullness. Like the young child imitating his parents - the young boy pretending to shave by his father at the sink, the young girl trying out her mother's makeup - we must act the part until it fits. His grace makes up for the mistakes along the way.

One thing is true: You will never be as fully YOU as when you are found in HIM. He has placed eternity - and the things of eternity, unfathomable things - in our hearts. Why else would He place such things there except that we might apprehend it, strive for it, live toward it? But it takes other-worldly sight. We must get our eyes off of the temporary, rotting things, and fix them on the eternal. 

"So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal." 1 Cor. 4:18