Walking Through the Waking World

I was finishing (only had about 20 pgs. left) the book The Four Loves on Sunday night. The last paragraph is great. I love the point C. S. Lewis makes. He says that if you are aware that you are dreaming you are no longer perfectly asleep. I love that. A few lines earlier he was talking about having a place where love for God should be (inside us) but if we didn't have that, possibly all experiences could point to the place ( a God-shaped hole) where God should be, so that we become aware of the fact that something should be there.-I can't begin to put it as well as him- read the book. His last sentence: "but for news of the fully waking world you must go to my betters." I guess I've just been thinking about that a lot lately. There's a Switchfoot song called "beautiful letdown" - it's pure poetry. "It was a beautiful letdown the day I knew, all the riches this world had to offer me would never do, ...........I was tryin so hard to fit in, to fit in , til I found out , I don't belong here, I don't belong......" We were driving down this country road on the way home listening to this song, and I was thinking about that sentence C. S. Lewis wrote, about how if we know we're dreaming- we're not completely asleep any longer. And then I was thinking about the anology I like to use, which I'm sure someone came up with ages before I did. I love impressionstic paintings-(although I'm not the greatest at that style) monet, manet, van gogh.... and I think maybe in a way it's like we're in a painting like that, this dreamy type of world, and to us it looks ok, because we're accustomed to it- like when your eyes get worse and you don't notice it until you put a good pair of glasses on. But when we really come "awake" -to put it so- it will be the difference between an impressionist painting and what we term as reality. And we'll suddenly realize how "unreal" - if you get me- our reality was when faced with actual reality. with God. It doesn't surprise me that people love fantasy-type books, stories, movies...... Is there something inside us that longs for the fantastic ? It doesn't surprise me , because we live in a fantastic world, we just don't always realize it because we're so accustomed to it. We are part of a fantastic story-one that all the great fantasy stories don't begin to rival. Do you think sometimes people fail to see the fantastic in all the stories we were raised on or have read from the bible, as if it's some dry reading about how to organize a desk drawer, or some do-it-yourself book that we only take intrest in when something needs assembled. Why do we pretend like it's such dry reading- when if you actually read it- it most certainly isn't. - Back to our dream-world. Do you ever have times when you are so fully aware that there's something other than this world, something that makes everything here feel so fake, so temporary that you actually wonder why you are still sitting there thinking about it? It's almost as if you expect to be sucked out of this world immediately and confronted with actual reality(that you know is there) and then are surprised that you are still here. Those moments are rare, I can't say I have many of them- but when they do happen -it's as though you glimpse a sliver of what you were really made for. Nothing makes sense, but it's almost as though you understand it, by realizing you basically don't know anything. Maybe you could blame it on the fact that I love travelling- but there is something in me at certain times, something that fully and completely knows this is not my home. It's not my home. I get that I'm talking about slightly weird stuff- and that people don't often try to describe things like this (most likely because you don't really know what you're talking about, or how to put it correctly, and at the same time are probably making yourself sound very much like an idiot. I'm usually good at that : ) but there's such a lovely mystery about it. I think it's important that we realize we're "dreaming" , it gives us the right perspective for the day. I hate it when people try to pretend as though they know everything about God, about heaven, they rationalize it down, turn it into something that's not a mystery at all- (there is a balance, ) I think they lose something beautiful. With our world of definitions, lists, steps, we get caught up. We forget that we are only temporary, that we weren't meant to stay in this world. That changes everything. It does if we actually believe it and don't just claim it. But to end with better words than I could claim, " for news of the fully waking world, you must go to my betters"