I miss it.
When you were a kid, there were no such things as painful emotional entanglements with the opposite sex. You could just have fun, and not worry about the consequences. There were no bills to pay, no debt, no worries.
The world was a massive place full of adventures, just waiting for you to find them.
And the joy of discovery, about everything.... was fantastic!!!
I so miss that.
And yet that got me thinking that that is precisely what God wants our lives to be.
He is the creator, He is the God of all things new, and brings newness and another opportunity to live a day to the full, in every single sunrise.
Yet we often live as if the evil, sin and negative in the world outweighs the bad, as if, somehow the circumstances of our day, either good or bad, effect our belief in a loving God.
God is truly Good, and He is Love.
We just need the faith to grasp that when it's hard!
I've just watched Peter Pan, and Lord Of The Rings. It's amazing that God speaks through a kids film, through a fairy story, through a fantasy. But maybe that's the best way, maybe that's the onl;y way God has ever spoken truly, in using stories of good triumphing over evil, of hope overcoming loss, of suffering being worth it in the end.
God constantly used amazing, indescribable things to capture the hearts and minds of his people through the prophets. He revealed Himself to be a God who is desperate to communicate his message of Love to his people. He'll do anything a parent would to direct their child in the right direction: encouragement, threats, discipline, a tough love that will always be pushing them on, encouraging them to reach forward... How does paul describe it?
Phillipians 3:12 I don’t mean to say that I have already achieved these things or that I have already reached perfection! But I keep working toward that day when I will finally be all that Christ Jesus saved me for and wants me to be. 13 No, dear brothers and sisters, I am still not all I should be,?*? but I am focusing all my energies on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, 14 I strain to reach the end of the race and receive the prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us up to heaven.?*?
Perhaps when we were kids, we were in some ways a little closer to that truth, because we had the hope, the faith, to believe without seeing, to push on regardless. Perhaps that's why some of us love fairy stories and fantasies so much. There's so much in the world that claims to "tell it like it is", in depressing and mournful terms, that tells us we're not what we should be, could be or would be. It's the attitude that tells us that it's always been this way, and it always will be. Story and fantasy and fairy tale point us to something better, something else. They are a mirror into what's really going on all around us, if we could only peel back the layers of this world, to see God behind the scenes, saving, redeeming, rescuing, making all things new!!
He has won, death is defeated, sin has no claim on this world, but He claims each of us as His Victory Prize!!
:-)
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