N.D. Wilson, on Stories as food for souls

  So many things have happened over the last months.  I hope to write out some reflection of it in how I’ve been thinking of the situations, of the season I've just come out of...but that’s going to take some time.

  Right now I wanted to share something that deeply watered my soul today.  Something that was talking about the fact that our souls need food just the same as our bodies do, or they’ll starve. 

  I listened to the inaugural podcast in a new series just today, and oh my GOODNESS.  I just about cried and shouted hallelujah.  I don’t know if it would mean nearly as much to you as it did to me, (and I hope it’ll stay up on the platform a long, long time so you can at least listen!), but there’s so much meaty TRUTH in it for absolutely anyone to glean from. 

Here’s the link to the inaugural episode of the 

      Stories Are Soul Food podcast, Episode 1 

                                               with Brian Cole and N.D. Wilson

  I wish I could find the words to summarize all of what was said, and just gush over all that I appreciated, how each bit encouraged me, how I’ve tried to express it in the past, and on and on and.....  But I’m still thrilling over how much it encourages me, and I just done feel like I have the words.  Plus, it meant what I needed and what I’ve spent so many years mulling over, so maybe I could touch that and explain a bit... but I’m not sure I could ever really pin it all down in even a series of posts. 

  So I'll just say that it felt like all the difficult gardening of convictions and understanding I’ve been building since I started writing stories back in my early teens, all the conversations I’ve had with people over the years, all the storytelling worldview I’ve come to and shared with others, all the ways the uses the storyteller in me throughout my life.....was all just said so beautifully in this episode. 

It was like someone just opened a window that has been stuck shut, and the air  really /is/ fresh and wild, the sky really /is/ blue, and the trees really /are/ tall and varied and green like I knew they just had to be. 

  I’m so excited and thankful for more of this podcast to come. 

  And follow it up with a couple quotes from the podcast;

“Souls need food.  Imaginations need food.  Especially young ones.”

~~~~~

“Any human, and any child, is going to eat.  And they are going to eat with their imaginations as well as with their bodies.  Or they’re going to cease to be.  If you don’t feed your kids, they stop being your children; they stop being, period.  But the same thing exists with their imaginations, with their souls; you HAVE to tell them stories.  If you don’t, someone will.  They’re going to feed somewhere. 

...They’re going to consume whatever they find.  ...They just are an indiscriminate vacuum cleaner.  ...They’re looking for food; they’re looking for food that challenges their imaginations. That shapes and molds their imaginations.  ...They WILL be filled [from somewhere].”

~~~~~

“Christians shouldn’t be the sort of people to just open any book or go into any theater and just settle down and go, ‘Oooo, I love it.’  That’s not really our attitude. ...[So] what is our attitude when we approach a new book? ...How does one go about culturing our palate?”

~~~~~

“We understand this when it comes to other things.  So if somebody told you, ‘I love food. I love ALL food.’  And you said, ‘Well, I’ve got this lousy 3-year-old TV dinner’, and they’re like, ‘HIT me; I love it! As long as I’m eating, as long as I’m putting stuff in my mouth, I’m happy.’  We all know to be deeply concerned. 

...But if somebody says, ‘I love reading’, those alarms don’t go off.  We don’t wait and say, ‘Reading what?’ before we pass judgment. 

...So, as we try to develop palates, we have to realize that it’s going to ruin a lot of stuff for you.  And so, the reason that parents and readers don’t do this a lot is, it takes the buzz away.  Because you have to stop being an alcoholic and start actually being a connoisseur. You have to start tasting and seeing, then passing judgment on stuff. 

So if you’re just, ‘I love reading’ or ‘my kids will engulf any stuff...ever’, that’s a problem.  You have to train them to throw a book away.  You have to stop reading, show them where the breaks are; teach them how to throw a book across the room. 

And also to say ‘Why?’  As they’re reading, they have to be thinking to themselves, ‘What is this saying? What is this doing to me? What is this food doing to my imagination? Where is it taking me? And is it true, good, and beautiful?’  And if not, spit it out, stop now.”

~~~~~

Living in the City of Ember

The prudent sees danger and hides himself,

but the simple go on and suffer for it. 

                                            Proverbs 27:12 

“The other night

I had a dream;

It was a world full of kings and queens

But it was cold,

Dark as the night;

We were the fire on the moonlit skies.

We weren't divided,

We were the same,

And we were free

But we all wore chains.

We couldn't see it,

But we created

A place between truth and overrated.

If I could just see it all

Just like a fly on the wall

Would I be able to accept what I can't control?

And would I share what I saw?

Or just sit back and ignore
Like nothing ever happened...

"...We had a plan to build a wall;

A great divide that would never fall,

To separate us

From all the pain,

And keep our skeletons locked away.

And brick by brick

We built it so thick

That it blacked out the sky and all the sunlight,

And one by one

We all became numb —

We were making the bullets to a broken gun.

If I could just see it all,

Just like a fly on the wall,

Would I be able to accept what I can't control?

And would I share what I saw?

Or just sit back and ignore,

Like nothing never happened,

And I haven't seen you before?

I'm on the run from a thief

I let into my head. 

...I don't think I need you anymore;

Take your words, and your lies and just beat it.

...I wanna live, I wanna be the change;

We can all be kings and queens

If we can just learn to believe,

If we can just learn to believe."

                                (‘Fly On The Wall’ — Thousand Foot Krutch)

  Years ago, a dear friend of mine introduced me to the movie City of Ember.  I did remember seeing the trailer for it way back when one of the Narnia movies was coming out, but the trailer wasn’t super fantastic...and I honestly didn’t care much about anything but watching my all-time favorite books coming to life on screen, however imperfectly, so I wasn’t paying much attention to any trailers. Ha.

  But once this friend shared the movie with me, I was attached.  This has seriously become one of my favorite movies ever.  I love the action adventure aspect, the costume and set design, the filming style, the fact that the filmmakers didn't turn the friendship of the main characters into a romance (whew!), the storyline, the soundtrack (which I weirdly love to listen to on repeat while gardening...), the adorable giant moth, that ending couple of sequences, the decrepit instruction sheet at the interlocking clear Generator key pieces...
  I wrote a quick post about it some years ago that you can find HERE.  (...please pardon the pictures that have disappeared... I need to go back and fix those...in all my spare time. Ha ha.)

  Well, as you're probably all aware, earlier this year, the world went...a lot more crazy than it already is.  And you probably thought, like I did, that as crazy as it was, we'd still be well past all of it in a month or two.  And...umm... Nope.  And so I'm guessing that you've been doing a lot of thinking and even more praying during these months, like I have.

  I'm not a dystopian fiction person, and I seriously dislike when people take whatever is currently beating down on the world and spin a doom-and-gloom, end-of-the-world tale of fear out of it.  Honestly, we can't even presume to say that it's "never been this bad before"; I mean really, remember the description of the days of Noah, when "the thoughts of their hearts were only evil continually" (Genesis 6:5)?!  Yeah, mankind is always sinning and finding ways to turn from our Creator, but we can't be making crazy claims like that.  It may be the worst you've seen in your lifetime, and we absolutely DO need to get on our knees and repent and help our generations clean our hearts, but beyond that is God's call.  ...And that's really a thought process to follow for another time.

  All that said, I do believe that fiction (along with history itself) is one of the strongest methods of warning, with the most impactful wakeup calls available to us.

  Lately it’s been striking to me how very much living in our world looks unsettlingly like the way the City of Ember functions.  Organized to a fault, fearful, insisting that the state alone knows best, foolishly leaning on and looking for long-lost human pillars of society to save us from a fundamentally broken world, and from ourselves.
  Just think about that Pledge the school children in Ember recite by heart day in and day out:

"...Beyond Ember, the Darkness goes on forever in all directions.  

Ours is the only light in a dark world."

  How paralyzing that kind of fear-planting thought is! (and how close to "ours is the only light" is that terrible new age advice we hear all the time: "seek truth/wisdom inside yourself"...)

  Ember is waiting, half in the dark, for the clock to wind down.  Branding the only ones brave enough to venture out and take risks as “crazy”, labeling them the “rebels” and “zealots” and “lawbreakers” (inventing or twisting laws as they need to prove it) for acknowledging that human wisdom can only go so far, and that we have to find the way Out in order to live.  While we let the real troublemakers roam free, skulking in shadows, stealing and back-scratching for the elite who pretend to share and understand the plight of the common man. 

  Frequently it’s only the youth who take the chance on getting Out...with desperate hope of Somewhere better; uncommon wisdom and faith planted deep in young souls by parents and mentors, who've hinted and encourage them to find the Instructions and understand them for themselves.  And then to use them. 

  In our world, the way Out is very, very real and more than assured — provided we follow the Instructions and don’t presume to know better.  Jesus has provided us an actual, Forever-Exit from the once beautiful City of Ember that’s crumbling around us. 

  But we usually show masterful skill at ignorance instead — keeping our heads down and doing just the opposite.  Wearing our thousandth-time-patched threadbare clothes, trying to be important and to gain a few pitiful, desperately old and rusted cans of things we’ve never tasted to hoard a little comfort for ourselves.  What a sorry picture we make. 

  Let's watch or re-watch this insightful adventure story again, friends.  Yes, it's fiction.  But that just means it has a very real chance of sneaking past our blind spots and hardened corners in our hearts, and really telling us something.
  Then let's be sure we're spending real time in the Instructions (and really, the Love letter) we've been given by our very real Exit; let the Word of God prove that it so truly is "living and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword" (Hebrews 4:12).

  We have answers.  And that nagging in our hearts is right; there IS something out there, something much greater than "Darkness [that] goes on forever in all directions".

  We escape to the sunrise, to the air and the light in the end, if we follow the Instructions.
  If we remember the Signs and do them in order.
  If we wake up that something Took-ish inside us, and push through the adventure.
  There's been a great Lion alongside us always, that half the time we do not remember, or see, or that we often fear.  But He's been between us and the edge the whole time.

  Here we follow what's been laid out for us, we push on and don't get distracted by trying to be comfortable in the crumbling City of Ember we were always meant to leave.  And then at the end, we come out into Sunrise, and actual Life in Eternity.  Not fear.  Enormous Hope.

“O the sweet air of Narnia!  

An hour's life there is better than a thousand years in Calorman.”

                                         (—C.S. Lewis, ‘The Horse and His Boy’)

(pictures and quotes always belong to their original owners.  They are only here to inspire.  All other thoughts are my own.)

Happy 501st Reformation Day

Happy Reformation Day  once again!

But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

                                                    Matthew 7:14 

  "Unless I am convicted by sacred Scripture and plain reason -I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other- my conscience is captive to the Word of God.  I cannot and will not recant, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe.  Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise. God help me. Amen."

                                                                         —Martin Luther 

...Fear not, for I have redeemed you;

         I have called you by name;

                     you are Mine.

                                                            Isaiah 43:1b 

  'And then she understood the devilish cunning of

                                                the enemies' plan.

By mixing a little truth with it

they had made their lie far stronger.'

                                                                          —C.S. Lewis, 'The Last Battle' 

'Cowards live for the sake of living, but for heroes

life is a weapon,

a thing to be spent, a gift to be given to the weak and the

lost and the weary, even to the foolish and cowardly.'

                                                                             —N.D. Wilson

...But the godly are as bold as lions.

                                              Proverbs 28:1 

(quotes and pictures always belong to their original owners/creators.  They are shown here only for inspiration.)