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Topic: Garden (09/07/06)
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TITLE: The Place I Visit In My Dreams | Previous Challenge Entry
By Bella Louise
09/09/06 -
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“Who can find my lovely garden?
It's the place I visit in my dreams.”
Incidentally, this song comes from a musical of Alice in Wonderland which I helped my mother organise for her class to act during the summer term. For those of you not familiar with the story, Alice fall down a rabbit hole and, when she eventually reaches the bottom of the hole, she looks through a tiny door into a beautiful garden. However, she is far too big to go through the door, and, in this particular musical version, mourns the loss in song. She then proceeds throughout the rest of the story, encountering numerous strange creatures and peculiar mishaps, to hunt down her “lovely garden”. Along her way, she gets showered with pepper, encounters a grin without a cat, is given the charge of a baby which instantly turns into a pig, and has tea with some rather disreputable characters. Of course, she eventually locates her garden, and her initial reaction is joy.
Imagine her shock when she discovers that the place she “visits in her dreams” is more the stuff of nightmares, inhabited by a lunatic croquet-playing queen, some mutant playing cards and a singing turtle. Trapped in her garden as the crowds advance on her chanting “Off with her head,” the play reaches its finale.
Alice, having achieved her dream, discovered that it was certainly not all she had hoped. She had gone through anything and everything to find her dream, and once she had found it, it accosted her with a flamingo-wielding mob. Often, this can be the case in life. When we dream something up for ourselves, and pursue it to the exclusion of everything else, it is damaging. Our fantasies rarely, if ever, live up to the expectations we have of them.
For example, one year I attended the auditions for my school's fashion show, and I put everything that I had into it. To my shock, when I checked the lists a week later, I was one of the few to have made it! There it was, my name in decisive black-and-white. I was about to shriek enthusiastically, when I saw three unfortunate letters next to my name-BHS. Ah. So, I would not, in fact, be modelling the latest trends from Miss Sixty, and I certainly wouldn't be appearing in the “bridal” section of the show, which I had auditioned primarily for. No, I would be modelling budget-line clothing in nauseating pastel colours from a shop for middle-aged women. The sort of shop that sells brown leather closed-toe sandals and beige tights. In the end, I talked myself back into being excited at the prospect. At least this would be a good opportunity to be pampered: to have my make-up done by a professional, to sit around with the friends I was sure I would make and gossip, to have my clothes chosen by someone knowledgeable. Instead, I was last in the queue for the make-up team and so had to do it myself, got mocked by my peers for being “way fat to be in a fashion show” so ended up sitting alone, and simply got told to “hurry up and choose” when I attended my fitting. My garden, rather like Alice's, turned out not to be what had hoped it to be.
However, there is a certain type of dream that will inevitably be better than we hope. God-given dreams. If God gives you a dream for something, you can bet that it will be better, bigger than you could possibly imagine. God never asks us to do something that we can do in our own strength. No, instead, He gives us dreams that we can only achieve by relying on Him. And when God is involved, things get exciting. When God asked me to examine the lack of Christian Union at my school, I never dreamt that in less than a year one would be up and running, much less that it would be taking assemblies. He's given me dreams for my new school already, and I can hardly wait to see what He will do, because I know He's an even bigger daydreamer than I am! Follow your God-given dreams above personal ones, and you can be sure that they'll meet and better your expectations.
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