...feeling like Alice

Have you ever felt like Alice? …In Wonderland of course.

It was a vision, sensation, thought some or all of these that struck me today.  The image came to mind of Alice held in an enormous spinning tea cup. Now I have no clue whether Alice is ever featured in the story in this way, as I have never read Alice in Wonderland. At this point I can hear a certain friend gasping in horror and disbelief – however my piecemeal absorption of the story, along with a little creativity and inspiration can still create a picture for me. So I replaced Alice with myself but maybe you can imagine yourself in the same way?

I am small within the spinning teacup and I feel scared, out of control and yet held in a safe space all at the same time. Sometimes this is how I feel and can visualise myself in the world that God has created. I’m a small person in a big space and within a big and unknown timeline. The world is an amazing wonderland, kind of crazy and fantastical in so many ways. So much of it makes absolutely no sense to us, I’m not sure God ever created it for us to understand but simply to be within and to enjoy.

In some ways God is my teacup. He holds me safe and secure within, whilst I spin crazily through the world like a spinning fairground ride.

I also imagine myself small, hugging my knees and sitting alone on the giant bottom step of a long winding stairway. This vision to me feels like God has put me in this space to contemplate my errors, where I have gone wrong or what I could do better.

I also occasionally take on the physical & mental rushed worry that the ‘White Rabbit’ – others, create around me. God created time and man created watches.  Time has a natural wonderland rhythm that watches rush us through and can make us miss.

Matthew Chapter 6

²⁷ Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?  ²⁸ “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labour or spin. ²⁹ Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendour was dressed like one of these. ³⁰ If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?”

The Mad Hatter’s riddles feel like my own struggles to make sense of myself, the world and my place within it. At times the riddles are fun to work out, they make me smile and they make me see in a whole new exciting way. At other times the riddles frustrate me, there are too many of them all at once, they seemingly never end or have a definitive answer and so I want to leave the tea party and get back into the protection of my teacup.

We live in an amazing wonderland where only God has all the answers and where we are all created uniquely and wonderfully.

So whilst I might be a bit weird, I enjoy the vision of being Alice. I am small; things are sometimes mad, spinning and confusing but I know that God is in control and I put my faith in Him.