So, here's a book I picked up over Christmas break, a cataloged entry of (almost) every fantastical place conjured up by the mind of man. I've found many of my favorites from childhood (Middle Earth, Narnia, the Coral Island, Lilliput, Never-Never Land, the Emerald City, etc.). As a girl, I devoured a successive parade of fiction volumes. I lived in a make believe world much of the time. When alone, I built fairy houses in the woods below our house; my dolls and toys were alive to me and I often carried on long and interesting conversations with people who did not exist in real life. I used to imagine little imps and elves prancing about our house at night, and would sometimes sneak out of bed to try and catch a glimpse of them, knowing all the while that they weren't
really real, that they existed only in my head and in the marvelous stories I read. I was especially enchanted with the Borrowers, and spent hours making itty bitty houses in my room and out-of-doors for them to live in. I suppose my parents have matured a bit since those years in regards to magic and fantastical playtime--I'm not sure they would encourage as much of it now as they allowed then--but as a grown up, I've come to the conclusion that there was only one bit of harm done from all the make believe: It gave me an incorrigible love for the whimsical, larger-than-life, unreal, adventurous happenings of the protagonists I knew and loved as my childhood friends. Their lives were ridiculously exciting, fraught with danger and intrigue from chapter to chapter (as I now know, an artful tactic employed by the authors to keep readers turning pages). In a small way, I subconsciously expected real life to turn out like those great tales.
It hasn't.
And I suppose I was a bit disappointed.
I found it depressingly hard to climb out of the mundane. Finish high school, be responsible, go to college, graduate, get a job, pay off college . . . now what? It's not that I regret the ordinary things I've done, but sometimes I catch myself daydreaming about the things that little girl imagined I would do when I was grown. I know others who've felt similar things, but I can't bring myself to join them and prance off to India on a "missions" trip that I would know full well is not about ministering but about doing something adventurous, not about serving, but about being footloose, and I guess I'm too proud to join that crowd, at least in my present frame of mind. So I sit at home on my day off, catching up on my Bible reading, watching the snow fall, making "healthy" trail bars that look and smell as unappetizing as pond mud, and wishing I had someone to go snowshoeing with. It's a perfectly fresh-powdered day.
But I've realized something. In some ways, I never left Fantastica (or Fantasia, as the film called it) behind. I don't always like real life because I haven't completely let go of the unreal.
I read twenty-seven chapters from the Word today (don't be impressed--I'll be behind schedule again in a few days). Aside from trying fervently not to fall away from a New Year's resolution only 12 days into the year, I've found that a mega-dose of Scripture has a similar overwhelming, pungently clarifying effect as the horrid vinegar-lemon-garlic concoction I drank this morning to stave off a sore throat. My eyes were watering then; it's my heart that stings a little now.
See, these people, these real people who lived in a world and era entirely different from my own--Abram, Sarai, Hagar, Isaac, Rebekah, Esau, Jacob, Reuben, Judah, Joseph--they are so much like me. I see in their dismal dysfunction my own self. I see the providential hand of God bringing about His sovereign will despite their bumbling (and sometimes malicious) deviations from His word. They doubted Him--that is something I can hardly fathom, they who walked out to speak to the LORD as one might speak to another man, they doubted His word--a word they had heard with their own ears, from the voice of God Himself! How easy it is for me to marvel at their short-sightedness, I who have perfect hindsight and the completed word of God sitting in my lap. I, who know how their stories ended, how they shaped the future of an entire universe, and how it all will end. And yet I am no happier than they, and for the same reasons.
It is time to sojourn out of the Fantasia of the heart--and although my mind no longer dwells in the fairy realms of my childhood, it has not embraced this existence entirely either. It's time. The days are fleeting. The end draws near, Scripture tells us. It is the last hour of the last day. Redeem the time, for the days are evil. Walk circumspectly. Do justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly with your God. These snippets of Scripture flit through the halls of my mind, wiping clean the old shelves of treasured fairy tales, filling the dim space with the pungent, piercing light of
reality. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.
I've not finished here by any means, this place is only a start, but a lovely part of commencing a journey is the relieving knowledge that it's finally
begun. I will always love fairy tales, love them for what they are--delightful little road trips into the imaginary. But I will now return at the epilogue's close, hasten back to the world and the life that is still so raw, unwritten, and vastly more complex than any story in its strange fabric of spiritual and earthly, certainty and unknown, joy and grief, doubt and faith--this thing we call, for lack of a better name,
real life.
