Here Am I

Connie Kendall wakes from a strange dream about a prophet, a heavenly throne, and voices crying "Holy, holy, holy" - but the dream is only beginning. Still inside it, though she doesn't know it yet, she finds Whit at Whit's End putting together a presentation about worldview, the set of things a person assumes to be true about the world. To show her how a worldview shapes everything someone thinks and does, Whit invites her to try out his upgraded Interactive Kids Radio, and suddenly Connie finds herself a contestant on a game show called Cause and Effect.

Her fellow contestants are a smooth-talking senator and Big Bear, a fuzzy children's television star, and both of them answer every question with fashionable ideas: crime comes from ignorance, problems can be solved with community awareness classes, and there is no absolute truth. Connie, who never even gets a buzzer, insists that crime is actually the result of sin - and promptly loses a hundred points. Fed up, she points out that if rules are only human opinions, she can make up her own rules and declare herself the host. The show dissolves into chaos, and the host cuts to a commercial.

Whit explains that whatever people assume to be true becomes their reality, which leads to the next question: what is reality? Instantly Connie is hosting a talk show, Candid Conversations with Connie, where her guests are Adam, Eve, and Satan himself. The three bicker over what happened in the Garden of Eden, each blaming the others, until Connie plays a clip straight from Genesis chapter 3. Faced with God's own account, Adam and Eve admit that yes, that's exactly how it happened. Connie realizes that reality isn't based on our perspective or experience - it's based on God's truth. Satan snarls that no one can handle God's truth, which is why people invent so many entertainments to avoid it.

The scene shifts again, and Connie becomes a hard-boiled private eye. A client named Mr. Meister, a university professor of situational ethics, hires her with an odd complaint: "I lost my truth. And I want it back." His truth, he explains, looked like whatever he wanted it to look like - warm, comfortable, and big enough to cover any situation, from speeding to cheating a customer on a used car. Connie follows the trail to Reverend Riven, a cheerfully unreligious pastor who thinks a one-size-fits-all truth is inconvenient and much prefers everyone having truths tailor-made for themselves, then to a library where Mr. Meister collected new truths, and finally to the National People's Communications Network, where Big Bear works as the receptionist. The one in charge, Big Bear says, is someone named Lucy - short, it turns out, for Lucifer.

Satan admits he's in the business of influence: he has persuaded Mr. Meister that he owns a custom-made truth when really the man has no truth at all, only lies. Gazing out the window, he calls the whole city one giant prison, its people caught in a web of lies they mistake for truth. Then he springs his surprise. The whole case was never a mystery at all - "It wasn't a wild goose chase. It was a trap." Connie is too dangerous, because people who talk about one truth ruin his plan. Her soda has been drugged, and his henchmen carry her off with orders to make her disappearance look like an accident.

At the parking garage, the elevator doors open on Whit, who flattens the henchmen with moves he says he picked up in night classes. Something has gone wrong with the program, he tells her, and he's been instructed to bring her somewhere else. Through a mysterious door, Connie steps into her own dream from that morning: the prophet Isaiah's vision of the Lord on His throne. She watches as a seraph touches Isaiah's lips with a burning coal and God asks who will go as His messenger. Whit tells her this is her moment - the moment every Christian faces. Connie understands at last and cries out, "Here am I, Lord! Send me! Send me!"

Then her alarm goes off. The whole adventure was a dream.

Later, at the real Whit's End, Connie tells Whit about it all, and he observes that God spoke to people through dreams all through the Bible. Her dream came from Isaiah chapter 6, which their Sunday school class studied recently, and Connie admits she's been thinking a lot about kids and all the garbage they see and hear. Whit believes every generation faces Isaiah's question: who will carry God's message to a world filled with lies? Connie wants to say yes but confesses she doesn't know where to begin. Whit's answer is simple - they'll figure that out together.