The Monday After

Last night I dreamed that I was one of the few sur­vivors of a flood. It was really inter­est­ing to watch giant waves tak­ing things away. Flood dreams are fairly com­mon. We live in a world that con­tin­u­ally looks like it is going to over­whelm us. There is too much. There are too many demands — too many respon­si­bil­i­ties and expec­ta­tions. We are about to drown in social events and insti­tu­tional require­ments, but some of us have a moun­tain­top per­spec­tive. We watch from a safe place.

Keep­ing your head above water takes some effort. Being com­pletely out of the flood takes a rad­i­cal per­spec­tive (In the dreams I stand on dry ground). The Noah story has always been one of my favorites. There is some­thing about the prov­i­den­tial sur­vival of chaos that cre­ates a real sense of total depen­dence on God. Social flood waters are every bit as rapid and heart­less as stand­ing in front of a tsunami after the great­est earthquake.

Sur­vival movies are some of my favorites. They gen­er­ally fol­low a for­mula of one or a very few ahead of the dis­as­ter curve. They watch the destruc­tion of the planet — after hav­ing warned the masses of some impend­ing doom. The dis­as­ter comes in dif­fer­ent forms — from invad­ing crea­tures from space to microbes gen­er­ated right here on this lit­tle planet.

It is never the nat­ural dis­as­ters that con­cern me — it is the ones cre­ated by humans that seem to get my atten­tion. Human­ity has a way of cre­at­ing its own socio/political avalanches. It dies by its own inventions…while think­ing it can save itself.

Today is the Mon­day after Spring Break. Many peo­ple are head­ing out to face their flood. Some will han­dle things calmly — oth­ers will be in panic mode. Per­son­ally, I’m bet­ting that the end of the world hap­pens on a Mon­day instead of a Fri­day. By the way, how is that ark of yours com­ing along?