Weighty Decisions and Anticipating the Frontier

 It is now midweek, and thankfully the school I work at has minimal coverage today - all I have to worry about is a gym class later that I just have to sit and monitor a bunch of kids bouncing basketballs around.  I have groused about this ridiculous coverage system we have here before - no other school has this, and it is a bit odd.  But, it is what it is, and thankfully maybe soon I can be done with it.  I am going to sort of fly by the seat of my pants today with this discussion and see where it goes, as I want to write but don't have a concrete topic to discuss.  I suppose I could pick up where I left off last time, the new frontier.

Being on the edge of a new chapter - a new frontier - is something that is both exciting and scary.  By the time you are at the edge of that, you are ready for the change but you are not sure how it is going to play out.  I have been in that situation before in all honesty.  Something also happens in your mind and your body as this new frontier starts to loom more prominently on the horizon, and today I want to talk about that a bit. 

I have talked before about the fact I take dreams seriously, as there are many dimensions to one's dreaming patterns.  Some dreams are a result of spicy food before sleep.  Others have prominent symbolism that maybe carries a message from God to us - God does speak through our dreams as the Old Testament really talks about in many places.  However, there are also some dreams that are simply a coping mechanism - you may be experiencing stress or fatigue, and your dreams can be a source of escape from the craziness that happens in the real world.  A lot of dreams I have been having lately are of that latter variety, and with the stressful situation of my work environment I believe that personal stress has a lot to do with bizarre dreams.  There is nothing particularly symbolic about them, but they have some different imagery - for instance, I had a dream a few nights ago that featured a miniature version of a Filipino spring roll called lumpia on sticks.  The lumpias were about maybe two inches long, and they had sticks at the end like kebab skewers which made them vaguely resemble brown fireworks.  The dream was a bit odd as I don't eat egg rolls or spring rolls, and I have never even had lumpia before despite the fact the special person in my life I am seeing loves them.  This is what coping mechanisms do though - they tend to take random things you observe and don't think much about, and then they are portrayed in our dreams in ways that we never thought of or imagined.  For instance, do micro-lumpias on sticks actually exist?  I doubt it, but they were in the dream.  That leads me to discuss something else in relation to dreams.

The human person is a remarkable creation of God, and the ability to dream is a gift he gave all of us.  Dreams can lead to inspiration for things, and they also provide a nice mental break from the things that burden us in life.  And, because God created our capacity to dream, our dreams are also a channel of communication he has directly with us, as often the imagery in dreams has a deeper meaning.  Now, to be honest, most of the research on dream interpretation has come from one of three sources - Freudian psychiatry, the occult, and hyper-Pentecostal televangelists.  Those three areas often overlap as well, and they tend to be suspect on many levels.  However, dreams are important, and I believe that once you peel off all the garbage that is out there, underneath are some good resources to help us take dreams more seriously.  And, as God used the dreams of people to get messages across in the Bible, there is some substance to understanding dreams as more than just a quirk of the human mind.  They can even prepare us for stepping into that unknown frontier we face.  And, let's talk more about that a little.

When people think of the "unknown frontier," they often picture a 19th-century caravan of settlers crossing the prairies in the American West, and then pausing to take in the massive Rocky Mountains that loom in the distance and grow larger with each step in the journey.  Crossing a mountain like that takes navigational skills and practiced maneuverability, and it often is fraught with challenges.  However, on the other side of that mountain is a broad expanse of green rolling meadows and in the distance the placid waters of the ocean.  This is how I see my life now - I was forced into the rugged wilderness of my own unknown frontier back at the end of 2024, and I am still crossing a range of rugged, wild mountains - except in real life, those mountains look like the Baltimore skyline.  However, I feel that I am soon going to approach a navigable pass that will take me to the fertile plain on the other side, and thus I am pressed to move forward although navigating the mountain pass is daunting.  I feel fatigued, frustrated, and ready to mentally collapse, but I need to press on - my survival depends upon that.  So, that is where I am now.  I can see the navigable pass over the great mountain now though, and where it leads will be worth the effort to get there.  And, thankfully, there are signs along the way which assure me I am heading the right direction - for the first time in a long time, I feel that to the core of my bone marrow. But, I am also older now, and I feel so tired of the struggle - there are days I wish I was where I need to be now in all honesty.  But, then God comes along and through someone or something reminds me to just keep going because I am on the right track.  It is where the stamina to press through comes in. 

The "rest stops" along that journey are dreams and other things God sends us, as God knows too we need to be replenished often because the journey is not always easy.  The dreams and other road signs tell us that something really good awaits us at the destination, and it gives us hope and determination to keep on.  But, if you know wilderness roads, there are dangers too - wild animals attacking, avalanches, weather extremes, etc.  You need to be girded up and protected against those too.  This puts me in mind of Hans Christian Anderson's Snow Queen, one of my favorite stories.

If you recall in that story, Satan created an evil mirror, and it shattered into billions of pieces.  If a piece of that mirror got into the person's eye, it distorted their vision of life - it replaced true beauty with ugliness, true love with selfish narcissism, and empathy with cruelty.  The two young kids, Gerta and Kai, were the central characters of the story.  In the original story, Gerta and Kai were in love, and they loved each other more than anything else.  But, when Kai was blinded by a piece of that evil mirror, it transformed him into something evil and he abandoned Gerta and his entire life in order to chase a false vision fed to him by the notorious Snow Queen, who wanted the mirror for herself to control the world. Gerta, heartbroken, seeks to go after Kai to save him from a dismal fate - the Snow Queen intends to freeze him to death to get that splinter for her own ambitions of reconstructing that evil mirror.  Her journey takes her to three different places - to the house of an old lonely woman who represents Spring, then to the castle of a prince and princess that represent Summer, and finally being kidnapped by a Gypsy girl and her mother who represent Autumn.  Eventually, with the help of all of these, Gerta reaches the ice palace of the Snow Queen in the far north, and she finds Kai.  What finally revives Kai and breaks the spell of the Snow Queen, and thus flushes the mirror fragment from his body, is Gerta's complete love for him.  He then returns home with her, and although Anderson didn't end the story a certain way, you see Gerta and Kai becoming a beautiful couple that live happily ever after.  Do you see the deep theological implication Anderson worked into that story?  Let me show you.

The evil mirror falling to earth represents Satan's fall from grace, and the shattered mirror represents sin and death.  Once one gives into sin, their vision is distorted and they don't see things with the eyes of Christ anymore - that happened to Kai, who is a picture of fallen humanity.  Gerta is like Christ - she loves her soulmate and will go to a great length to save him.  That is how Christ loves us - he gives all he is to save us because we are special to him as his Bride, the Church.  It is Christ's saving grace, given through baptism, that washes away the splinter of sin in both the eye and the heart, and as a result, we are restored to who God created us to be.  To add an apocalyptic twist, think of the shards of the broken mirror also as the mark of the Beast - they distort what God made us to be, and as a result, we can become eternally lost.  Many pieces of classic literature like this were written with a hidden message of redemption in them, and that is what makes classic literature more important to study and understand.  In our own journeys too, we can be blinded by bad desires, and it can alter the course God intended for us unless that nasty concupiscence is either removed or contained.  The means of that happening is supernatural grace, and the more of that we have, the less influence sin and bad desires have over us - they are still there, and we are still a work in progress, but their power diminishes as our faith grows.  That, I believe, is also the message that Anderson wanted to get across in The Snow Queen too. 

The frontier indeed is daunting, and as we travel toward it we face obstacles.  Some of those obstacles are as small as pebble that trips us up a little, but they can also be massive like a mountain range.  We rely on the grace of God to navigate us, and as we do so, we begin to not only progress on the journey, but we can easily spot and avoid those things which would be potential obstacles too.  That is true whether we look at our overall lives, or at specific seasons we come to.  

I think that summarizes my thoughts for today, so I will leave it on that note.  Thanks again for visiting, and will see you next time.