.gif)
As I occasionally mention, I am a Dr. Who fan. Dr. Who is a science fiction television
program produced by the BBC; the Doctor is a Time Lord who travels through
space and time in his Tardis. The
original version ran from 1963 to 1989; and while this iteration of the series
holds a firm place as an icon of British television for many viewers, I found
what little I watched of it to be too cheesy and far-fetched to keep my
attention. The re-booted series started
in 2005, and it, too, is often cheesy and far-fetched. But the new Dr. Who often offers something that not only grabs my attention but
keeps it: insight into the nature and relationships of human beings and an
invitation to wrestle with moral or ethical questions.
In a Dr. Who
episode that I watched recently, the Doctor is traveling with two companions,
Amy and her husband Rory. In the process
of exploring a new place and time, Amy is left in another time dimension and
needs rescue. Although the Doctor and
Rory find Amy quickly, they soon discover that she has been struggling to
survive in a hostile environment in a faster time stream where almost 40 years
have passed. So in Amy’s time stream,
decades have gone by, but for the Doctor and Rory in their time stream, no more
than a day or two has passed. In her
almost 40 years of waiting, Amy has become hard, bitter, and devoid of emotion
apart from anger. She wants nothing to
do with the men who abandoned her.
Amy has good reason to be angry and wary of the men who have
now—finally—come to rescue her. And this
is where the episode transcends mere science fiction and becomes real food for
thought. Amy must come to grips with the
perception-bending truth that while her nearly four decades of misery is very
real, the Doctor and Rory did not abandon her the way she feels they did. She needs to release her anger. And then she must allow herself to access her
emotions and engage in relationship with the Doctor and Rory so that they can in
fact rescue her. The rescue has become
as much about rescuing Amy from her heart of bitterness as it is about rescuing
her from her situation. And in true
television fashion, Rory slowly coaxes Amy to recover her emotional memory of
their relationship, and in the end, she sacrifices the security of her
bitterness in order to recover the “real” Amy.
It strikes me that Amy’s experience in this episode of Dr. Who is often our own. We are truly and deeply hurt, and it very
much feels like God has abandoned us, or at the very least, is excruciatingly
slow to rescue us. But we are living in
a different time stream than God. We are
bound by time and our sin nature, while God is eternal and perfect. And while our pain of living in this fallen
world is very legitimate, our perception of God is often artificially and inappropriately
limited. We are so hurt that we no
longer feel that we can trust God. And
so, like Amy, we need to resolve our anger in the light of the larger truth
that our Lord will never leave us or forsake us. And beyond that, He will work great good out
of our most difficult times of suffering.
Without doubt, we have the difficult work of grieving to do. And then, as we allow ourselves to feel
emotions other than fear and anger, we become able to cooperate in our
rescue—to trust our Lord to redeem even the most difficult of circumstances. And in true Biblical fashion, the Holy Spirit
and our spiritual brothers and sisters can fan the flame of our faith, we can
embrace our Lord’s rescue, and then become our real selves, the people our Lord
created us to be and become.
