From Author John Eldredge..."Epic"
Life, you'll notice, is a story......Story is the language of the heart......Stories shed light on our lives.
For most of us, life feels like a story we've arrived at forty-five minutes late. Something important seems to be going on....maybe. I mean, good things do happen, sometimes beautiful things. You meet someone, fall in love. You find that work that is yours alone to fulfill. But tragic things happen too. You fall out of love, or perhaps that other person falls out of love with you. Work begins to feel like a punishment. Everything starts to feel like an endless routine.
If there is meaning to this life, then why do our lives seem so random? What is this drama we've been dropped into the middle of? If there is a God, what sort of story is He telling here? At some point we begin to wonder if Macbeth wasn't right after all: Is life a tale "told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?
No wonder we keep losing heart.
We find ourselves in the middle of a story that is sometimes wonderful, sometimes awful, often a confusing mixture of both, and we haven't a clue how to make sense of it all. It's like we're holding in our hands some pages torn out of a book. These pages are the days of our lives. Fragments of a story. They seem important, or at least we long to know they are, but what does it all mean? If only we could find the book that contains the rest of the story.
Chesterton had it right when he said, "With every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand.
The world has lost its story. How that happened is quite a story as well.
Wouldn't it make sense that if we ever did find the secret to our lives, the secret to the universe, it would come to us first as a story? Story is the very nature of reality. Like the missing parts of a novel, it would explain these pages we're holding, the chapters of our lives.
Second, it would speak to our hearts deepest desires. If nature makes nothing in vain, then why the human heart? why those universal longings and desires? The secret simply couldn't be true unless it contained the best parts of the stories that you love.
Yet it would also need to go deeper and higher than any of them alone.
Christianity claims to do that for us.
Not the Christianity of proper church (building) attendance and good manners.
Not the Christianity of holier-than-thou self-righteousness and dogmatism. That is not Christianity. Oh, I know it's what most people, including the majority of Christians, think Christianity is all about. They are wrong. There is more. A lot more. And that more is what most of us have been longing for most of our lives.
A Story. An Epic.
Something hidden in our ancient past.
Something dangerous now unfolding.
Something waiting in the future for us to discover.
Some crucial role for us to play.
Christianity in it's true form, tells us that there is an Author and that He is good, the essence of all that is good and beautiful and true, for He is the source of all things. It tells us that HE has set our hearts longing within us, for He has made us to live in an Epic. It warns us that the truth is always in danger of being twisted and corrupted and stolen from us because there is a villain in the story who hates our hearts and wants to destroy us. It calls us up into a story that is truer and deeper than any other, and assures us that there we will find the meaning of our lives.
Reflections ...
There is an essential point John is trying to make here regarding true Christianity. He is not discouraging us away from church attendance, or God's call for us to carry ourselves rightly (righteously), but simply exposing the work of the enchantment. The deceiver has succeeded in a big way with regard to this worldview. Holier-than-thou self-righteousness is what the enemy of saving faith wants the unbelieving to think the church is all about. It is indeed repulsive, and certainly a problem within congregations around the world, but it is the exception, not the rule. True Christianity is full of the power of God and has retained its potency throughout history by and through authentic humility, not attitudes of self-centered glorification. Jesus Christ came to set His creation free from this very attitude; to set the captives free from attitudes that imprison them.
The following Tale written by John Eldredge from his book Desire, is full of allegory. It is a picture of the lives we lead. It would do us good to ask, "Where does our own life fit into the story?"
[ The Sea Lion ]
Once upon a time, there lived a sea lion who had lost the sea. He lived in a country known as the barren lands. High on a plateau, far from any coast, it was a place so dry and dusty that it could only be called a desert. A kind of course grass grew in patches here and there, and a few trees were scattered across the horizon. But mostly it was dust.
And sometimes wind, which together make one very thirsty.
Of course, it may seem strange to you that such a beautiful creature should wind up in a desert at all.
He was, mind you, a seal lion. But things like this do happen.
How the sea lion came to the barren lands, no one could remember.
It all seemed so very long ago. So long, in fact, it appeared he had always been there. Not that he belonged in such an arid place. How could that be? He was, after all, a sea lion. But as you know, once you've lived so long in a certain spot, no matter how old, you come to think of it as home.
There was a time, many years back, when the sea lion knew he was lost. In those days he would stop every traveler he met to see if he might help him find his way back to the sea.
But no one seemed to know the way.
On he searched, but never finding. After years without success, the sea lion took refuge beneath a single solitary tree beside a very small water hole. The tree provided refuge from the burning rays of the sun, which was very fierce in that place.
And the water hole, though small and muddy, was wet, in its own way.
Here he settled down, and got on as best he could.
Had you journeyed in those days through the barren lands, you might have seen the sea lion for yourself.
Quite often in the evening, he would go and sit on his favorite rock , a very large boulder,
which lifted him off the burning sand and allowed him a view of the entire country.
There he would remain for hours into the night, silhouetted against the sky. And on the best nights when the wind shifted to the east, a faint smell of salt air would come to him on the breeze. Then he would close his eyes and imagine himself once more at the sea. When he lay himself down to sleep, he would dream of a vast, deep ocean. Twisting and turning, diving and twirling, he would swim and swim and swim. when he woke, he thought he heard the sound of breakers.
The sea was calling him.
The sea lion loved his rock, and he even loved waiting night after night for the sea breezes that might come. Especially he loved the dreams those memories would stir. but as you well know, even the best of dreams cannot go on, and in the morning when the sea lion woke, he was still in the barren lands. Sometimes he would close his eyes and try to fall back asleep.
It never seemed to work, for the sun was always very bright.
Eventually, it became too much for him to bear. He began to visit his rock only on occasion.
"I have too much to do," he told himself.
"I cannot waste my time just idling about." He really did not have so much to do. The truth of it was, waking so far from home was such a disappointment, he did not want to have those dreams anymore.
The day finally came when he stopped going to his rock altogether,
and he no longer lifted his nose to the wind when the sea breezes blew.
The sea lion was not entirely alone in those parts. for it was there that he met the tortoise. Now this tortoise was an ancient creature, so weathered by his life in the barren lands that at first, the sea lion took him for a rock. He told the tortoise of his plight, hoping that this wise one might be able to help him. "Perhaps," the tortoise mused, "This is the sea." His eyes appeared to be shut against the bright sun, but he was watching the sea lion very closely. The sea lion swept his flippers once against his side, gliding to the end of the water hole and back. "I don't know," he said. "It isn't very deep.
Somehow, I thought it would be broader, deeper. At least I hoped so."
"You must learn to be happy here," the tortoise told him one day. "For it is unlikely you will ever find this sea of yours." Deep in his old and shriveled heart, the tortoise envied the seal lion and his sea. "But I belong to the sea. We were made for each other."
"Perhaps, but you have been gone so long now, the sea has probably forgotten you." This thought had never occurred to the sea lion. But it was true, he had been gone for a long, long time. "If this is not my home, how can I ever feel at home here?" the sea lion asked. "You will, in time." The tortoise appeared to be squinting, his eyes a thin slit. "I have seen the sea, and it is no better than what you have found here. You have seen the sea. Yes, come closer," whispered the tortoise, "and I will tell you a secret. I am not a tortoise. I am a sea turtle. But I left the sea of my own accord, many years ago, in search of better things.
If you stay with me, I will tell you stories of MY adventures."
The stories of the ancient tortoise were enchanting and soon cast their spell upon the sea lion. As weeks past into months, his memory of the sea faded. "The desert," whispered the tortoise, is all that is, or was, or ever will be." When the sun grew fierce and burned his skin, the sea lion would hide in the shade of the tree, listening to the tales woven by the tortoise. when the dry winds cracked his flippers and filled his eyes with dust, the sea lion would retreat to the water hole.
And so the sea lion remained, living his days between the water hole and the tree.
The sea no longer filled his dreams.
It was in May that the winds began to blow. The sea lion had grown used to the wind, and at first he did not pay much heed at all. Years of desert life had taught him to turn his back in the direction from which the wind came and cover his eyes with his flippers, so that the dust would not get in.
Eventually, the winds would always pass.
But not this time.
Day and night it came, howling across the barren lands. There was nothing to stop its fury, nothing to even slow it down. For forty days and forty nights the wind blew. and then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped.
The sea lion lifted himself to have a look around. He could hardly believe his eyes.
Every single leaf had been stripped from his tree. The branches that remained , with only a twig or two upon them, looked like an old scarecrow. And I do not need to tell you that there was no longer any shade in which to hide. But worse than this, much worse indeed, was what the sea lion saw next.
The water hole was completely dry.
Three Weeks After the wind had ceased to blow, the sea lion had a dream. Now, as I told you before, there were other nights in which he had dreamed of the sea. But those were long ago and nearly forgotten. Even still, the ocean that filled his dreams this night was so beautiful and clear, so vast and deep, it was as if he were seeing it for the very first time. The sunlight glittered on its surface, and as he dived, the waters all around him shone like an emerald. If he swam quite deep, it turned to jade, cool and dark and mysterious. But he was never frightened; not at all. For I must tell you that in his dreams of the sea, he had never before found himself in the company of other sea lions.
This night there were many, round about him, diving and turning, spinning and twirling.
They were playing.
Oh how he hated to wake from that wonderful dream.
The tears running down his face were the first wet thing he had felt in three weeks.
But he did not pause even to wipe them away; he did not pause, in fact, for anything at all.
He set his face to the east, and began to walk as best a sea lion can.
"Where are you going?" asked the tortoise.
"I am going to find the sea."