The Power of a Story

I am a big fan of fiction.  If you ever come over to our house this would be very apparent.  Our living room and bedroom both have bookshelves that are filled with fiction. 

When an author is trying to communicate a powerful truth they can come right out and tell you, which is the easier way to impart knowledge, or they can allow the reader to recognize this truth through a story.  For me this is the much more powerful way to learn something.  There is a sense of ownership, almost as if we are the first ones to discover this idea, instead of it coming from the author.  One author has been especially able to do this throughout my life.
 

C.S. Lewis is probably best known for his Chronicles of Narnia, and understandably so.  They are filled with great truths and fun adventures.  There is a clear Christ figure in Aslan and we can learn about God’s love, mercy and power just from reading The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. 

It is one of his other works that I just finished reading again that spoke truth into my life.  If you haven’t read The Screwtape Letters I would strongly recommend it.  To see a Christian’s life from the perspective of a demon is not only interesting and slightly scary, it brings such a different perspective on life that it forces us to re-evaluate our own perspective. 

 There is a slight spoiler in this section so be warned.  I want to share with you a paragraph from the book that really struck me.  The Christian has just been killed by an air raid in World War II and Screwtape (Demon #1) is writing to Wormwood (Demon #2) telling him what the man must have been thinking as he died.

“Did you mark how naturally—as if he’d been born for it—the earth-born vermin entered the new life?  How all his doubts became, in the twinkling of an eye, ridiculous?  I know what the creature was saying to itself! ‘Yes. Of course.  It always was like this.  All horrors have followed the same course, getting worse and worse and forcing you into a kind of bottle-neck till, at the very moment when you thought you must be crushed, behold!  You were out of the narrows and all was suddenly well…You die and die and then you are beyond death.  How could I ever have doubted it?”

In my conversations with the students we have often talked about wearing “kingdom goggles” which I use as an encouragement to think about heaven and the rewards we will receive there.  This paragraph explains it so much more powerfully than I ever have.  Things of this earth will admittedly seem beyond surviving, and sometimes this is true.  Our goal shouldn’t be to survive this world, but instead we, like the Christian in the story, should be striving to see the new life instead of this one. 

As I read the chapter that this paragraph is in, I couldn’t help but yearn for the future.  Death seems so much happier when we remember that we won’t be entering the unknown, instead we will be entering the glorious presence of our Lord and Savior. 

Dear God let me learn and remember the truth that we are not made for the world as it is now.

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Josh Earhart

About the Author:
Josh serves on staff at Westchester as Associate Pastor of Student Ministries