Friday, Alice In Wonderland opened up, and I hope to see it today. I haven’t been feeling real swift, so we’ll see. At any rate, it supposed to be a followup story to the original. Alice is grown and has forgotten all about Wonderland. Then, she falls down into a hole and everyone’s trying to remind her of previous events. It turns out that Wonderland is in chaos and needs her, and her return is most fortuitous for them.
In the original, the Mad Hatter poses the riddle without an answer, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” It was never intended to have a solution, but people persisted in asking. Finally Carroll Lewis himself gave in and offered one: “Because it can produce a few notes, though… they are very flat; and it is nevar [sic] put with the wrong end in front!” (See Wikipedia article, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland). Others have been, “Because Edgar Allen Poe wrote on both”, and my personal favorite, “Because neither ride a bicycle.”
The interesting part of this is the persistence of people to seek an answer to the riddle, not believing it has no answer. It would appear, in fact, that the whole point of the riddle is that people always seek answers to questions. Not seeing the irony, people continue to try to answer the riddle that was never meant to be answered.
It would seem that people have an inbred curiosity about things, and that includes the ultimate question: “What is this life all about, anyhow?”
I believe this comes from a void in one’s life, often referred to as a “hole in your heart”. As sappy as that may sound, it seems to be true. People seek answers all sorts of ways, and they seek to fill that unfillable void with all sorts of things. It is this void that prompts us to seek out God, the only One Who can truly fill a bottomless hole. God is the ultimate answer to all of the riddles.
HWA used to say God made man perfectly, placed him into a perfect garden and gave him the perfect mate. However, he argued, “perfect” does not necessarily mean “complete”. There was a missing element. There was a missing dimension. Mankind was made for something more than just a physical existence, and the point of this life is to seek out that higher calling.
Of course, sin came into the world, which means we now need a Savior to reach our full potential. However, even after our sins are covered, we still need the Holy Spirit to complete us. We need the mind of God within us. Otherwise, our corrupt natures will just pull us back down into the pit.
And yet, this world is blinded to so much of this. They are deceived into believing a lie. And, they will continue to fill their voids with temporary unsatisfactory things until the chains of that deceit are broken.