Fainthearted Slumber

Sleep is a wonder.

As a child, it's viewed as an unwelcome interruption that hushes pretends and half-coordinated grand schemes. Occasionally (or, well... more regularly) protests explode before a toddler surrenders themselves to rest. Those hot, exhausted tears on flaming cheeks and shrieks of misery are blinding. All wonder, all joy, it is coming to an end!

But eventually, Rest takes a small fingered hand, dries the tears, and kisses sleep onto those reddened eyes. Mother's caress, Father's embrace, becomes a haven. Their arms no longer hamper little wishes. They are a harbor for journeys familiar as night, and as new as the morning.

Sleep is so secure, so trusting.

Now we are older, but sleep can still carry a touch of the abstract. Sometimes sleep is as difficult to appreciate or attain for me as it was for the little Rebekkah who protested against nap time with tears that betrayed this was exactly what my exhausted toddler body needed. For myself and my peers, sleep can still carry associations of defiance. There is the conscious effort to push away drooping lids to experience and accomplish more, more! We try to make more time by stretching it out... futilely. Or we try to make time disappear by quickly sailing through unconscious night the vessel of deep rest. But instead of arriving on the longed-for shores of the morning, we become painfully aware of our fitful wrestling against sleep beckoned that will not come.

My mind doesn't always catch the signal from my worn-out limbs. As the fog of calculated cognition dissipates, my thoughts crystallize into pointed diamonds that prick my tired body. They descend like slivers of light from the yawning expanse of darkness to hold my head hostage. Though ready to cross over, my thoughts flit into unexplored burrows, keeping me bound with scintillating jabs of incessant distraction. I cannot cross over yet. Like calculated counter attacks to my tired limbs, thoughts begin to descend, cutting tangents into the draped sky to lengthen it's dark expanse. I am kept still, not yet entering into the land of slumbering release.

Nights like these are unwelcome, but they help me journal more readily. Sleep is a treasure.
How blessed we are in the confounding truth that strength is given through weakness. So much stock is set in activity achieving, and, yet all this is impossible without the antithetical posture of sleep - to rest and be. In the Sabbath lies our strength.

This past Thursday I found myself in Nashville, TN to see my sister and some wonderful friends perform at the Grand Ole Opry. Music lingered in my memory as the clock struck midnight, but with the show over, it was time to make the trek home with my sister and our friend. For an hour the two of us just talked on the porch steps while my sister slept. Against a symphony of crickets in the dark, the door opened to bring us inside so she could gather her things for her flight home at dawn. By 2:30am we were on the way to the airport. She and I said our goodbyes, the first of many that following day. I'm saddened that I won't see her as often now, but that actually makes the anticipation of heaven so much sweeter. Goodbyes won't be a part of the common tongue there.

Shane Salzwedel

As I drove back to the house where my sister and our other friends were already sleeping, the world began to change. At first, it was just a slight thing. A wisp of white hung low over a tree top. Then, wisps drew deeper breaths and became clouds, hanging like a dust sheets over invisible pieces of furniture above the road. Lights began to smear in the distance. The thin sheets of cloud turned into curtains and began to coagulate, thickening, spreading. Mass, color, light, and form disassembled themselves from each other. Solids became permeable as all the world was smudged. It was a dream world, but was I awake or sleeping? I thought of giant fingers messily holding the sphere of time I now passed through. A handful of headlights probed the dark, but could only see so far past the foggy fingerprints, not nearly far enough to frame this evanescent world and discover where it belonged.

John Bainbridge

It was 4am when I found myself back at the house. I wanted to hang there, suspended between the morning and night, between waking and sleeping. Would it be possible to rest there in the space of the night? To think and pray and wonder in solace until the dawn? I grabbed my knitted blanket and tiptoed past those slumbering and onto the front porch. Logic was fleeting in this odd hour as I curled up by myself on the wooden bench and faced the road.

I paused to rest my head on the arm rail and watch the speeding cars go by. Thoughts skated lazily as I inhaled the thinning night air. No sharpened star dust to pierce me awake tonight. Across the way, roosters began to crow, sunrise still an hour away. It might have been an age. Was this the morning? Was this still the night? Perhaps I choose to stay and find out. Perhaps I wanted to preserve this incomprehensible state of waking. Perhaps, like a dream, I have forgotten why I did it at all. Thoughts, like dreams, don't make sense that late, or that early. Still, they come. Why does the cock crow when there is still no sign of morning? Why do cars insist on rushing by in the dead of foggy night? Why do I choose to sit here and not to go to bed? It was all a bit surreal sitting on that porch until 5am while the house slept, just me and the neighbor's roosters. Yet, while it happened, it's hard to remember why. It's almost as if I dreamed while waking.

Summer Pools and Silver Screens

It's July, and the Midwest summer heat is smothered everywhere like butter. Here in Missouri, the past two months have been characteristically humid in the most uncharacteristic of ways: rain. Buckets and buckets of it. The aftermath looks like trolls have come out of hiding to angrily chomp away at the roads. ("Stress-eating", as I heard it hilariously put.) I absolutely love the rain, especially when it means I can slip into another good book, or enjoy ambling walks through unending, lush green grass. While sunny skies are deciding to make a more regular appearance, I'm still hanging onto the hope that neither of these little delights will disappear for me anytime soon.

Whatever the weather, summer is a time for waterside adventures, clinking iced beverages, and (hopefully) space to kick up your feet or plot some fantastic new venture. Though I have had some serendipitous summer travel, adventures often come in smaller packages. Like diving into a hundred pages of a new book in an afternoon, or crowding to see the newest blockbuster (or, ahem, newest Redbox addition). 

In the midst of all these adventures, I find myself on the edge of something much further away. Each time I pick up a book or maybe settle in for a show, I'm not just here in the physical space of Missouri. I am on the edge of a pool far away, in a wood very different than the one outside my window. There is an enticing call of other worlds that has echoed once before. It beckons me to enter, just like it did to two children who peered over the edge. What could be in there? What might we find? 

This pool I sit at in my thoughts belongs to the Wood between the Worlds, the land C.S. Lewis introduced as the first doorway into Narnia on the dawn of the world's creation. Polly and Digory stumbled upon this place of pools and worlds through the magic rings of a manipulative uncle. They soon discovered that their yellow rings would take them into the Wood suspended between universes, while the green rings would turn each pool into a portal and allow them to enter into another world.

Like Digory and Polly, I become transported to another place with each story I enter into. Even if I just think to slip in for a cooling respite, the stories are designed to take me somewhere.

Each one a new possibility: Adventure, mystery, perhaps even danger. 

The truth is, I can't really know what I will find until I get there. What these children found beyond their pool was the shattered civilization Charn. Magnificent, eerily compelling, and wasting into decay.  A large red sun bathed the landscape in the waning light of death and disaster. There were signs that unspeakable things could be lingering here, but a question moved them further into the world to discover what happened here, and what story this place would tell.

When you submerge yourself in a world, that world begins to soak through and affect your interaction with it. The two children come upon a great banquet table filled with people frozen in dramatic expressions of nobility, grief, and malice, each figure adorned in the most sumptuous of fabrics and jewels. This place was filled with captivating scenes, and awe-inducing displays. Digory began to forget he was in a place that was sick. He simply wanted to go further in. 

In another part of the room, the children discovered a table with a bell bearing an ominous description.

Make your choice, adventurous Stranger

Strike the bell and bide the danger

Or wonder, till it drives you mad

What would have followed if you had

Despite Polly's pleas to leave, Digory had remained in this place long enough to let all he saw capture his imagination. After all, horror of horrors, what kind of state would they be in if they left now, and never discovered what would have happened if they stayed? Yet preserving wholeness is not always compatible with satisfying intrigue. With a ring of the bell, something awoke. Like the choice to press further into a tale and suspend our own disbelief, the boy struck a chord that shifted the children's positions from observers to participants. Their postures of self-distancing were suspended, and the world opened wide so they could fully enter in, unaware that this act granted permission for their surroundings to access them as well.

Jadis, the great queen, had awakened.

Those who know the story of The Magician's Nephew remember that the children, realizing the evil they had stirred with this woman, try to run. Despite their attempts to flee, they inadvertently draw the queen back to London where she wreacks absolute havoc. Even as they attempt to bring her back to her decayed world, everyone touching the children on that London street find themselves in a new, uncreated world, where the whole party watches a Lion's song form the land of Narnia. The weakened queen tries to flee, only to bide her time in hiding until she can emerge as the White Witch. Things are ultimately set right as Narnia grows deeper roots, but restoration takes much more time than the choice to let things remain unbroken.

We enter worlds of other imaginings all the time, be it through a pool of the silver screen or book cover doorways. I still love to look for echoes of Aslan's call when I enter any of these. "Awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters." I can't really know what I will discover until I'm there, until I've seen some of it, but we all carry the rings to access and exit in our pockets. I can always put on my yellow and green ring, and choose to come out. Despite the otherworldly imaginings of grandeur, riddles of plot, or display of compelling emotions, undesirable things can begin to soak in and affect my feelings and perhaps even influence action. I too can bring things back with me that threaten to wreck an internal world and raise itself up as ruler in my thought life. Yes, I have unwittingly let Jadises enter into my head space when I was not equipped to deal with them. 

What is even more unsettling than access is that, while the effect can be more than we desired, the act is not always unwillingly done. Digory admitted he knew what he was doing, despite his pretend of being enchanted.

Though I am a part of this world called Earth, I belong to another. The Jadises I entertain don't just affect me, nor even the world outside my mind. I am an ambassador for another Narnia, a heavenly kingdom. When the voice of the Holy Spirit urges me not to ring the bell of suspended disbelief, but to slip on my ring and leave, I can trust that there may be danger here that I am not able to ward off. If I give breath to those foreign figures of thought, they can gain strength to build unseen kingdoms and suppress generations seeking to know the Lion of Judah, the Lamb of God.

While I am entering into summer stories, I hope to take delight, look, explore, and glean. Still, I would be wise to remember the rings I carry. The choice to remove myself from where unwelcome things may stir is still within my grasp. Eyes are portals (like pools) to my soul. The things I invite in are not always easily contained by end credits or epilogues.