Impossibilites

"A-dressing the White Queen" by John Tenniel,
for the 1865 edition of Through the Looking Glass

In the stories of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, we meet a young girl who goes down a rabbit hole and finds herself among hookah-smoking caterpillars, playing card characters come to life, and cats who can make themselves invisible. Alice is constantly coming across fantastical things – a Mock Turtle, unanswerable riddles, even pink flamingoes used exclusively for croquet mallets. When she meets the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, the queen tells her that she is “just one hundred and one, five months and a day.” Alice exclaims that she can’t believe it, and the queen instructs her to take a deep breath, close her eyes and try again:

`There's not 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.'

We are a lot like Alice. Despite all the miraculous things happening around us, when confronted with something impossible, we claim defeat and don’t even bother trying to understand it. We look at the  sun providing us with warmth and light without so much as a second thought as to how it came to be, and yet when we can’t figure out how to pay our bills we decide that it’s impossible. We have no problem believing the fact that giant metal boxes filled with people can fly miles above the earth, but when a loved one gets cancer, we think their healing is impossible.

God is more like the White Queen. Jesus says “But with God everything is possible (Matt 19:26 NLT)” – in other words, for God, nothing is impossible. God can pay your bills, heal cancer, throw mountains into the ocean, create a dry pathway in the middle of the sea, bring men back from the dead. You have to believe that he can – faith, after all, is believing in what you cannot see. If you believe in God but can’t bring yourself to believe in impossible things, then in the words of the queen, you haven’t had much practice. 

Take a deep breath, close your eyes, and try again.