STORY: New Land Awakening

Sullivan was the quiet one.  He was usually the only one who really listened to the counselor.

Sullivan and 11 of his friends had grown up without parents in an old cabin on the outskirts of a big city.  They all slept in the same big room and were all woken up each day by the counselor.  They would have been about in middle school but the counselor said that none of the schools taught what would be valuable in the next life. So he taught them each day.

The counselor was a very strange man.  Most of the features on his face were very small and subtle.  He barely had a nose, his eyes were large.  His mouth was small.  He had no hair and his skin was the color of vanilla pudding.  He was shorter than any of the kids and walked strangely, turning his body to the side and bobbing his head with each step.

The counselor was always teaching them the same things.  But many of the kids didn’t listen.  Each morning the counselor would wake them up and would ask them to walk with him into the pastures and valleys around the cabin.  But many of the kids disobeyed and went the other direction and spent their days in the city.

The counselor woke them up this day just like any other day.  And as they were going out the door the counselor looked at the ones that never listened to him and said, “Please my young gentlemen, please come with me today.  I have to teach you something very important. I have been waiting a long time for what is about to happen, and I’m afraid that you are still not ready for it.”

One of the boys, Darwin was his name, turned and challenged the counselor.  He said, “Counselor, you tell us every day that we will never be satisfied with the food, the girls, or the wealth that we find in the city.  But what do you have to offer us that will satisfy?”

The counselor put his hand on Darwin’s shoulder and said, "It will not truly satisfy, but I'm afraid we will not be here long enough for it to teach your how truly dangerous it is to be driven by such things."

Darwin looked down at the tiny, strange looking man and said, “If what you have for us makes us look like you, I don’t think any of us want it.” Darwin turned to his friends and they all laughed.

The counselor said, “My dear gentleman, Darwin.  The day is almost here and if you have not strengthened yourself against such immediate pleasures in this dream, you will not be strong enough to resist when you wake up.  The dream is almost over.”

One of Darwin’s friends spoke up and said, “You’re always talking about this as a dream.  And you've told us we’re almost at our destination for a while.  But none of us know what you’re talking about.  All we know is that each day we get to go party in the city.  What else is there? Wandering around in empty fields?” The boys began to turn away.

The counselor ran up to them in his awkward gait and he grabbed Darwin’s hand.

Darwin felt something strange in his hand and he jerked his hand away.  A strange vanilla colored egg bounced onto the ground- like a shelled hard boiled egg, but smaller and yellower.  They all looked at it.  The counselor picked it up and held it back out to Darwin.

“Please gentleman Darwin, I've been trying to train you all up to the point where you can eat this when you are hungry instead of eating the food of this world.  If you can be satisfied with this egg, you will survive. If you do not eat them in the next world your body will not be sustained.”

They all looked at the egg that the counselor held out to them.

“I’m scared to ask you what that is, man,” Darwin said.  “It’s the same weird color that you are.  Where did that come from?  Did you lay an egg?” Darwin laughed at how weird the counselor was and looked at his friends so they would laugh to.

Darwin and his friends shook their heads and walked away into the city.  They began to bob their heads to the heavy dance music calling to them.  Some of them reached into their pockets for money as they walked towards smoke shops and donut parlors and the bar where they usually got breakfast.

The counselor turned to the four that remained.  He held the egg out where they could see it.  He said, “Will you four desert me too?”

They looked at each other and then Sullivan spoke up.  “We want to believe you, Counselor. But sometimes we just don’t understand.  Sometimes the things you say just don’t make sense.”

The counselor nodded his strange, bald head and blinked his large tired eyes.  He began to walk in his strange way toward the fields. The remaining boys followed him.  The counselor said, “I know it’s hard to understand me.  But you have to trust me. There are things that are more real than this dream for which I am preparing you.  I have traveled for years and years to come get you, sent by your ancestors.  And to prepare you to enter my world and survive in it.  Like these eggs.”  The counselor put his hand on his satchel.  “We must gain a taste for these eggs, for they hold the nutrition needed in the next world.”

They walked along a dirt path into a deep, quiet valley.

Sullivan spoke up again, “Why would we need to eat this?" Sullivan pointed at the egg. "Other food seems to satisfy our hunger better.”

The counselor said to them, “We are on a long journey right now, and our bodies are not really moving.  We cannot move them.  So we must strengthen our minds.  I am training you and keeping your minds strong so that your bodies will survive too, when we wake up.  Darwin and his friends smoke and drink and eat what they want all the time.  And when they get hungry, the only way they know to be happy, is to eat more food or to get another cigarette or to go find another girl that they can use to make themselves feel happy.  But if you consume what I give you, you will not be hungry for those things all the time.  Your mind and your spirit will be strong.”

“Our spirit will be strong?” One of the other boys asked.

“Yes,” the counselor replied.  “The other boys are not feeding their spirit, but every day that you walk and talk with me, and learn about what it will be like in the new land, when we awake, the more your spirit will be fed, and will be able to carry your body to life.”

The boy said, “But I don’t know about eating a strange egg.  That’s just too weird for me, Counselor.”  The boy looked at his friends and tried to get a laugh out of them.

Sullivan definitely didn’t laugh.  The counselor looked sad as he said, “The thing is, my young gentlemen, if you do not learn to eat of my food, you will not survive the journey."

Sullivan stopped as the others walked on.  Eventually they noticed and turned to look back at him.  Sullivan said, “Then counselor, as much as I don’t understand it, I want to trust you, I will eat try to eat an egg.”

The counselor smiled and looked at Sullivan proudly.  He walked back to Sullivan and handed him an egg.

Sullivan turned it over in his hand.  It had a flat part on the bottom.  It was jello-y, and slightly translucent.  It had a white-ish, yellow-ish tint.  he took a little bite.  It tasted very plain but was soft and easy to eat.  “These aren’t so bad.” He smiled at his friends.  “C’mon guys.  We’ve already come this far.”

The others slowly took the eggs and ate them.  They finished and began walking again.  They walked through the fields and valleys.  They sat and talked.  The counselor asked each of them how they were doing and how he could help them.  Then he reminded them, like he always did, of the three things above all that he needed them to remember.  He said, “My young gentlemen, in order to survive the new land you will need to remember these three things.  First.  Always trust what I say.  No matter how much it doesn’t seem true.  There are enemies that are trying to deceive you.  Second, do your best to purge yourself of the need for dirty, less satisfying things.  And the last thing that you must remember to survive the new land is this, Help the needy among you.  Even when they have nothing to give you.  You will be surprised which ones are really the ones who matter.”

The next day their awakening was different than the rest.  They all awoke to an earthquake.  It shook their beds.  And many of them toppled to the floor.  As they woke up, they all noticed the strange elastic material stretched over their heads.  It was some sort of metallic screen that perfectly shaped over each of their heads and faces.  Small blue sparks traveled through the mesh, in front of their eyes and around their heads.  A strange metallic cord came from each of the mesh helmets and arched over to a box on their bed frame, like thin, bending tree branches.

As they peeled the elastic mesh from their heads and looked around at each other trying to figure out what was going on, the counselor rushed into the room- but it didn’t look like he usually did  He was old and hunched.  His strange vanilla skin was droopy and wrinkled.  His large eyes were tired.  And his tiny nostrils were flaring in and out as he breathed hard.  “Are you all ok, my young gentlemen?  We have finally landed.  It was sooner than I had thought.  The ground came out of nowhere.  We are not as close to safety as I had wanted so we will have to walk the rest of the way.”

Darwin was the first to his feet and he yelled at the counselor, “What’s going on? Why do you look like that? What were those things on our heads?!”

The counselor replied, still breathing hard, “You have all been in hibernation.  We have been traveling for sixty years. Your ancestors sent me to earth to get as many babies as I could before the earth’s atmosphere got too poisonous.  These ancestors that sent me left long ago when they found out the world was in trouble.  They found my planet and sent me back to find children that I could save.  Your parents probably didn’t believe that the earth was in trouble. But if we had waited until it showed, it would be too late. And most of them were too busy living and playing to be planning for your futures.  You were the only one’s I was able to save.  I found you as infants and it took us 60 years to get here.  But because of the masks,” the counselor pointed at the mesh helmets attached to the bed, “You guys only aged 16 years or so.  Even though I was in the hibernation dreams with you I had to stay awake to monitor it and drive the ship.

Sullivan realized something, “So you’ve been traveling for 120 years?”

The counselor nodded.  "We are the only creatures that would live long enough for this trip to get you." Then he said, “Well, young gentlemen.  It is time to move.  We have ten or twenty miles to travel until we are safe.  I need to warn you that everything I tried to teach you in the hibernation dreams are absolutely crucial to remember now.  Remember those things that I told you will not satisfy? Well now those things are outright dangerous.  Creatures from this world will use them as bait to lure you in.  They want to enslave you.”

Darwin looked at his friends and shook his head mockingly.  “This is weird, but he’s full of crap.”

One of his friends said, “And even if those things are just bait, we can resist it now because now we know that it’s bait.”

They went out the front door and though the area around the house was different, it looked strangely similar to where they had always been.  There was a huge beautiful city in the distance.  There were rolling hills and little paths.

“It looks exactly the same here,” one of the boys said.

The counselor replied, “We programmed the dream maker so that it would look really similar, so that you could be trained in what it would be like.”

One of the boys who had always gone into the city replied, afraid, “Uh oh, maybe I should have practiced doing the right thing.”

Darwin scoffed at him, “You’re scared?  You believe this crazy old alien?  I think THIS is the dream.  I can do whatever I want in this dream and I’ll just wake up when I wake up.”

The counselor walked briskly with his strange swaying gait.  His strange yellowy skin flaking off on the back of his head as if he were shedding.  The path took them between a steep mountain and the edge of a little town.  they could see down the narrow streets of the town.  People were walking in the streets laughing and dancing.  But it was a languid, vapid movement; they seemed hunched and sapped of strength. They were smoking and drinking as if they were depending on that to make them better.  A woman who might have been beautiful 30 years earlier, and less of the weight of the world on her shoulders, saw them and called to them!  She eyed them mischievously and laughed as she walked into a building with music coming from inside.  The buildings were low and close together.  They had familiar neon lights and promise of food and drink. Each had enormous doors where five people could walk side by side and go in together, taller than two men tall.

Darwin said to one of his friends, “Dude, this is just like we’ve done a million times. there’s nothing wrong with this.  Let’s go in and just get a little pick me up to get us through this god-forsaken journey.”  Darwin and two of his friends broke off from the pack and started walking into the town, like they were used to.

The counselor glanced back and it was like he had feared.  He was losing them.  He leapt with a strength they had never seen in him before and he landed a few feet behind them.  He called to them hysterically, “My young gentlemen.  It’s a trap! Beasts are waiting in the buildings to come out and get you! The people are like fishing lures drifting through a stream! Don’t go over there! You have to believe me!  We’ve come too far to lose you now.”

Then one of the boys behind the counselor said, “Ooh, do you guys smell that? It smells like bar-b-que.  That would be so good right now.”

The counselor turned around as soon as he heard that and said, “No!  No!  You have to be strong!” He pulled out one of his eggs from his satchel and held it out to the boy as he said, “If you are hungry, you don’t need anything more than this.  It’s not as tasty but it has the nutrients and chemicals to help you process this air and bacteria here.  Once we get to the safe town there will be much better food than this egg or the false pizza they use to lure you. It will bring you life.”  The boy hesitantly took the egg.  He sniffed it and gave it back.  He walked by the counselor and said.  I just can’t do it.  Those eggs just have no flavor.  I need flavor.”

The counselor cried out and ran after them but could not turn any of the five young men around before they were into the city too deep.  The counselor stopped, grieving his momentous loss and watched them wander down the street being charmed by the people. He glanced frantically at the gaping doorways.

As they came close to one of the women, they saw the fear in her eyes.  The look on their faces suddenly changed from being charmed to being frightened. She glanced back to the doorway of one of the buildings as if she was waiting for what she knew was inside.  She turned back to Darwin and his friends and said, “I’m sorry.  If I didn’t bring you to him, he would hurt ME.”

And the next moment they noticed a large shape lingering in one of the gigantic doorways.  It looked like a huge hunch-back man but was three times as tall and was as thick as a rhinoceros. He yanked on a rope which was under the dirt all the way up to them. A large lasso attached to it slid under their feet and knocked them down. Then the beast barreled across the street towards the boys.  He flicked his knobby hand and a large net flew at them.  The next moment the boys, along with the woman, found themselves held down by the thick, heavy ropes in the net.  The huge beast rushed to close the net, admired his catch for a moment before he laughed into the air and dragged in his floundering, crying catch.

The counselor dashed for the remaining seven boys and they ran as fast as they could from the sight of this small town.

After a few hours they were trekking silently along the ridge of a mountain in the dark of the night. They began to get hungry again.  The counselor handed out more eggs. 

Still, several of the boys complained about the eggs.  They wanted something more.  They said they were hungry and couldn’t go on.

“That is the air talking,” The counselor said.  “It makes human bodies very hungry.  But your spirit within will be strengthened with the eggs and by the strengthening of your character. Each of your bodies will likely go through a death-like stage as it tries to cope with the new air and bacteria in our air.

Throughout the night each of the remaining boys buckled over at some point and their bodies froze enough that the others had to take turns carrying them. But by caring for the weakest among them they all made it through to the morning.

And as they emerged from a cave at daybreak when they saw the counselor in the morning, he had shed so much skin, it looked almost translucent to his organs below. But light was coming from them. And the skin that was left had minute wrinkles, like that of a 90 year old human.

They boys attended him and the counselor said, A need a few minutes. My time has almost come. Abide with me. My spirit is about to shed this body, to be ready for a new one. Yours will as well. But if our spirit is not strong enough, it will not be sustained throughout the body's transition. It is good you all have helped each other, for sacrificial love is the main strengthening of the spirit."

And within the next few minutes the last thin layers of skin seemed to dissolve, and a light emerged from it. His body opened up and the bones and organs grew dry, gray and slumped to the elements.

The most beautiful multifaceted light twinkled with hundreds of colors like a diamond in sunshine. The light didn't seem to have a face or produce sound, but they could just feel it's desires and intentions by the tones of color and vibration. It began to move and they followed it further down a path into a valley where they could see the big shining city sprawling out before them.

And as they followed for the last few miles each of them found their own bodies failing in different ways again as well. But now they could see how to train their spirits with committed friendship and sacrificial love and honesty and kindness. And then as their bodies failed, their spirits were strong enough to carry them along. For here the spirits were what were stronger than the body.

As they arrived, they were taken to the descendants of the ancestors that sent for them. And they were welcomed warmly. These people were all beautiful. Strong and bright honest smiles. But the new boys were monitored closely and were told that they must strengthen their spirits for every time their body died, the spirit would have to be strong enough to sustain itself until their next body was born. And the glory of their maturing spirit was what guided the growth of the body they would grow up in next.

They lived in the beautiful city of advanced technology, stewarded well to give them life to the full. They raised delicious fruit and worked on new construction and new technologies that could bring more, enduring community and joy to the city.

Every now and then there was word of someone not nurturing their spirit and therefore being lured to the outer kingdom by easy living and tempting pleasures. And their spirit would diminish with these things and when their body died, their spirit would very not survive the time between bodies and cease to exist.

In a few years their guide, the counselor, came back to the group that had made it, he came as a boy of the same species they had known him as, But his bright caramel skin and beautiful multi-colored eyes, and smooth gait showed that his spirit had been well trained in his past, weak ugly body. For he was one of the most glorious creatures in the whole city.

(John 6:25-63)

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