“We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us,
though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true
light, the eternal truth that is with God.” -J.R.R. Tolkien
Day to day life is mundane.
It’s boring. It’s the same thing
day in, day out.
How many people fall for this lie? And how many people use stories as an escape
from the boring life they’re living? How
many people will pick up The Chronicles or Narnia because they love Narnia and
it’s so much more exciting than the real world?
This is nothing less than an abuse of stories. Stories shouldn’t be crafted as an escape. Stories should be used as an awakening.
Our imaginations are a gift.
The making of stories is a gift. But
too often we forget that the world we live in was made by an imagination. God in His infinite power and wisdom and
imagination created the world we live in.
The trees are His handiwork. Whatever
lies at the bottom of the ocean is His handiwork. We are His handiwork. The grand scheme of history is His handiwork. God is the Storyteller. What we fail to realize as we listen to or
read a story, is that the pictures we create in our mind are taken from the
world we know and live in. Whatever we
imagine is ultimately being drawn from and impacted by the world we see around
us.
So, the goal of a story shouldn’t be to provide an escape
from the world we live in but to awaken the wonder of it. What can be learned in the fictional realm
can be applied in reality because the fundamental substances in fiction have already been invented in reality by the
greatest Storyteller. To write a story
is to reflect the imagination of a God who wrote this world into being. We think we’re creative beings. Really, we’re just plagiarists taking what we
see in an effort to make it our own. It’s
not ours. It’s His.
So let the stories you read and write awaken you to look for
the beautiful things around you. Believe
me, you won’t have to look very far. “To
be bored in this world, is to be boring.”-Gordon Wilson
Reading The Chronicles of Narnia shouldn’t cause me to crawl
into my bedroom cupboard in search of a new world. C. S. Lewis’ goal was not just to make a fantasy
world. It was to awaken the desire to
see the magic and beauty and struggle in the world we’re in, to give hope that truth
and goodness and beauty will prevail in the end, and to give courage to pursue
these things in the life we’re living.
This is the goal of a story told well.
