An Audience of One (Solar, The Fourth Wall, Communism, Disneyland, Declined)

The Fourth Wall is an interesting new term I’ve just learned thanks to GM at Five Word Monologues. Picture a stage as a box with one side cut out so we can peer inside. This “missing” side, The Fourth Wall, is an invisible partition that actors are supposed to ignore as they perform. Sometimes, though, an actor will speak directly to the audience. This is called “Breaking the Fourth Wall.”

The idea of The Fourth Wall brought something else to my mind. There is a thought in Christianity that says when we worship, whether it’s formal worship in a church, private worship at home, or just living out our daily lives in a worshipful manner, we are playing to ‘an Audience of One.’ All that we do, we are doing for God, to please Him alone. I think the thought is disturbing to some who envision an ogre staring at them in their most private moments – judging, poking, and prodding. Or others feel that they must live perfectly, putting on a Disneyland veneer, so that to all outside appearances life is beautiful, while underneath there is a lot of scurrying around to deal with all the trash. I can relate to both.

Mostly, though, God for me is a Presence who teaches, guides, and directs my steps in this journey He’s set me upon. He writes my storylines, coaches me in how best to be true to the script, and then sits back to enjoy what I offer up to Him. He cheers, claps, and laughs at my antics. He sometimes cries, too. I find Him most pleased with me when I remember to occasionally “Break the Fourth Wall” and talk directly to Him.

I like to think sometimes of all the things God has watched us humans do on this little planet zooming through the solar system. This weekend I visited Nags Head and saw the monument to the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk. Their first flight was in 1903. In just 63 short years, we took the seeds Orville and Wilbur planted and grew them into a rocket that flew men to the moon! I wonder if our Audience was amazed at such spectacular ingenuity. Did He applaud? What about all of our attempts through the ages to create Utopia, a Heaven here on earth? Did He moan over the ideology of communism, seeing down the road to the devastation it would cause? Did He cry and cover his face at the horrors of the Holocaust? I imagine He just plain declined to attend the debut performance of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.

And we know His heart broke as He watched the ultimate climax of our story, the death of His Son, Jesus.

~Belinda tries to write for an Audience of One at her blog Upside Down Bee.