So I'm up unusually early this Saturday morning. I couldn't go back to sleep after a bit of an all-to-vivid dream. It was about a combination natural-disaster in our area and the resulting chaos of failed law-and-order. ...somehow I ended up fleeing Warsaw to Columbia City and everyone had knives or swords and was just running around stabbing people, as if to establish some kind of order to protect what they thought they would need to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. Strange stuff...to be dreaming about. But also, I suspect, a reality that lurks beneath the surface of our collective psyche.
The news from around the world does sink into us somewhere, despite our efforts to turn it off. Our state-of-things is shockingly tenuous. It wouldn't take much for us, here, to be in a similar state. It wouldn't take much to send us all into a funk of fear.
I write this for 2 reasons. One, it reminds me that there are a lot of dependencies in life, and not nearly as many independencies as I would like. And two, ironically, it is in our dependencies that we have opportunity to find real life. Such deep-rooted fears inside of us can break way for us to acknowledge that we are truly needy and humble people. Life is mystery and we must learn to trust in our dependencies, rather than in the things we stay so busy at trying to protect ourselves. This, actually, brings us to an unexpected kind of relief. We have to trust something anyway.
The good news is that we have Someone who is trustworthy...even in a fearful world where we can't really trust much of anything or anyone.
