It's 1966 and I can hear Walt Disney in his presentation talking about his new dream with his very subtle twang..with all the excitement in the world. He's done a lot up to this point, things that left huge impressions on us, but when you see him talk about it or read about his ideas for this new "Disney" you can just tell this is what he's been trying to articulate and express through his first parks--this is what's been inside of him.
Walt Disney explains "the Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow" and you think 1) where did this idea come from and 2) why didn't it happen. When you watch the videos with him describing EPCOT you wonder for a few seconds why would Disney spend money on this and not on a park (like they ended up doing), but after you read about his heart behind Epcot you then get upset that it never happened! And especially if you're from Orlando and you think about how you could've been in the city that had this futuristic-world town, it bums you out. (Don't get me wrong, I love the Epcot we have now! It's a lot fun. The rides, Food & Wine, the countries..you should go if you haven't!)
But back to the two pts.. where did this dream come from and why didn't it happen. Both of these actually have the same answer.
In the beginning God created and designed everything, but left it unfinished and untapped in a way that gave humans the opportunity to build, cultivate, and create from out of our own imagination and hands; this gave us the chance to do what we love. No matter who you are, there's a big part of us that likes to create whether it's music, art, cooking, necessary products, designs, Legos, how our house looks, friendships, something with wood, comedy, or even our own styles. Everyone likes to create, but we also have a strong inclination to need to, almost like the difference between feeling accomplished vs something missing if we don't. And just like God created and designed the cosmos (whatever that means to you: 7 literal days, through evolution, etc doesn't make a difference for this) he weaved us in a way where we 1) want to create and design and 2) the cosmos needs us to create and design. The earth, as perfect as it would be if humans wouldn't ruin it, yearns for us to take the resources available and cultivate something amazing out of them: taking trees and making furniture, making metals, discovering the different sounds that exist by playing the guitar, learning to alternate between crops each season due to the different chemicals released by each one. This is the mandate God passed onto us. This is the mandate we crave to fulfill.
However, as we know with mankind, we tend to screw things up. We can't just take what is needed, we take what we want to the point of depletion, and we carelessly do it along the way. We can be cruel, both purposely and accidentally. Stepping on others along the way to what we're building is a minimum, because we have in us the want to oppress and turn other humans into nothing--we call it competition, but sin has hijacked it. And there are no exceptions, we are all missing the mark in some way. We all have something that handicaps us from truly loving and caring, but we really, really want to do things right too. It's messy. Just like how Paul describes in Romans 7.
So...we're beings with imaginations and a desire to bring them to life yet at the same time we're imperfect so how does that work out? Well, it looks like Epcot.
The Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow was a vision Walt had in his heart and honestly, it's what everyone has. This desire to see the world safe, progressing, clean, healthy, innovative, adventurous, utopian. It comes from that weaving God did in us; he made us to live in Paradise. Not in brokenness. We're paradise-beings trying to live within a world that has cancer in everything. This universe is at its core a good place with good people designed to be a good life, but has a disease that makes it rabid. And the only cure is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. It's through Christ that will restore everything to what it should be, but until life is fully redeemed we will be in this spot where we want our world the way it should be, but can't seem to get to it--like running through hardening concrete.
Epcot is a reminder that there's something in us that's really good, but when it comes down to it we will always get in our own way.
Epcot was affected by this disease we made, but there are places that through Christ, hard work, discipline, fighting, and a relentlessly pursuit have been able to make visions like these into realities. And it's our job as the church to do we can to help bring to life the foretaste of what is to come.
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