The Impossible

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying”, she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes, I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

The Queen’s words to Alice in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass”

It seems to me that many have lost the capacity to believe. Most of those who serve in positions of governmental leadership don’t believe in all that the founding fathers laid down as our very foundation. In our society, we don’t even believe that humans can wait until marriage to be physically intimate; we have reduced the fabric of humanity to the stuff of which animals are made. Our urges control us and therefore we must give our children birth control to take the place of self-control. How have we arrived here? What happened to believing that we can be what we were created to be, the very image of the living God? That now being the fabric of our society, how can we then believe that we are capable of doing anything that does not appear naturally within our reach? Much of what God desires for us is too great, too impossible, and too far-reaching for our natural abilities and so we settle for what is base and minimal because it is all we think we can attain.

In his book, Sex God, Rob Bell says, “If your energies don’t go into a few, select disciplined pursuits that you are passionate about and are willing to give your life to, then they’ll dissipate into all sorts of urges and cravings that won’t even begin to bring the joy that the “one thing” could.” In America, we teach our children to grow up and make a living instead of making a life, to settle instead of search, to passively accept insignificant things rather than passionately pursue the “One Thing”.

We must not allow ourselves to be lulled by such small thinking. We must regularly remind ourselves that those things we allow to be buried deep within us by the cares of this world are the big, impossibilities that God actually wants for us. What about you? Are you believing impossible things? I have a half hour…I think I am going to get started.