Come Further In, Come Further Up!

I have been writing pages and pages about stories and thinking a lot about stories lately. Interestingly, it keeps coming up in my life, whether in the blogs I read, podcasts I listen to, in church, or in my selection of books I am reading.

Truth in stories is ringing in my days lately. My eyes have been glued to the pages of truly good stories, like The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis. It is the last book of the Chronicles of Narnia series. I find that I need really good, deep stories that reach into my soul and open doors. A breath of fresh air filled with longings of another place.

There are so many hidden gems within these pages. The lines leap out into the imagination and I realize that without imagination we cannot have hope of what is to come. That new beginning at the dawn of the new creation. Or, in Narnia, the old has died and the new creation is right before their eyes. The new Narnia looks and feels like the old one, except it is deeper. It is more.

A new place that looks so familiar and yet it is even grander than one could possibly imagine. In the new Narnia, the children realize that as they run deeper and deeper across the grassy landscape and up waterfalls, it gets bigger and bigger. Passing into one gate, they see that what they just passed into is even larger than what they just left outside the gate.

The old Narnia was much beloved because it was a tiny bit like the new creation. We recognize the beauty of God in these tiny pieces.

In regards to stories, our art of writing and using our imaginations is a gift and it matters eternally. All that we create here holds tiny seeds of eternity. God will make our old creation perfectly real in new creation. All that is good will be what it is meant to be. All beauty here shows glimpses of what is meant to be.