An Underlying Reality
Time continues to march on. Soon it will be one whole year that Lana and I have been calling all of you our Faith Community and Family. I can’t believe that it has been almost a year. Time has gone by so quickly and yet there is still so much to learn and there are still so many people to get to know!
It has been so great to get to know everyone, but there is also still more for you to learn about me. For instance, many of you probably didn’t know that I’m a nerd when it comes to certain things like Star Trek, Star Wars, Godzilla and, of course, Lord of the Rings. In fact, it was just about a year ago now that my most gracious wife threw me a Godzilla/Star Wars/Lord of the Rings themed birthday party. Yes all three in one party! It was awesome! You should have seen the cake! It incorporated all three movie themes – amazing!
I don’t think I’m the only one who is into fairy tales, fictional adventures, and science fiction journeys of some sort. In fact, I think deep within all of us there is a longing for an escape into some sort of fictional adventure, world, or dream. Shoot, you can ask Lana about how much dreaming I do throughout the day! I have been interested in this universal longing since my college class on Tolkien and learned about his thoughts and writings on fairy stories. In my class I learned something really interesting. Tolkein belives that the tales, stories, and dreams that we find ourselves longing to escape to, “bear witness to an underlying reality.”
For some reason I never fully grasped that “underlying reality” until I was in a discussion recently about the book “Preaching” by Timothy Keller where Keller points out that the underlying reality is in fact the Big God Story… the Gospel itself. The Gospel is what we are truly longing for whether we admit it or not. Think about it…creation, the fall, redemption, restoration. It is the greatest story ever told and yet it’s real and true and we literally get to walk in that story! There is even a hero in the story and that hero is true, tangible, and real. That hero is Jesus. We have a real life hero who is better than Aragorn, Luke Skywalker, Captain Kirk, Iron Man, Captain America, Superman all combined and He loves each one of us individually and walks with us in His real story. Now I don’t know about you but walking through my own day, life and story just got a whole lot better because every day I get to live in a real adventure and the hero knows my name!