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I went to SKS (Christian book warehouse) today to pick a book for a dear friend's birthday... I must say, the two hours or so spent there had been fruitful. One of which... was my coming across a little paperbag book entitled "Epic: The Story God Is Telling" by John Eldredge.

I'll let this little excerpt speak for itself. :)

Matrix. The Lord of the Rings. The films you love are telling you something very important, something essential about your heart.

Most of us haven't stopped to ask ourselves, Now why that heart? Why those longings and desires? Might we have been given our longings for love and adventure, for romance and sacrifice as a kind of clue, a treasure map to the meaning of Life itself?

Next, I want you to notice that all the great stories pretty much follow the same story line. Things were once good, then something awful happened, and now a great battle must be fought or a journey taken. At just the right moment (which feels like the last possible moment), a hero comes and sets things right, and life is found again.

It's true of every fairy tale, every myth, every Western, every epic - just about every story you can think of, one way or another. Braveheart, Titanic, the Star Wars series, Gladiator, The Lord of the Rings trilogy. They pretty much all follow the same story line.

Have you ever wondered why?

Every story, great and small, shares the same essential structure because every story we tell borrows its power from a Larger Story, a Story woven into the fabric of our being - what pioneer psychologist Carl Jung tried to explain as archetype, or what his more recent popularizer Joseph Campbell called myth.

All of these stories borrow from the Story. From Reality. We hear echoes of it through our lives. Some secret written in our hearts. A great battle to fight, and someone to fight for us. An adventure, something that requires everything we have, something to be shared with those we love and need.

There is a Story that we just can't seem to escape. There is a Story written on the human heart.

As Ecclesiastes has it,

He has planted eternity in the human heart. (3:11 NLT)

Look, wouldn't it make sense that if we ever did find the secret to our lives, the secret to the universe, it would come to us first as a story? Story is the very nature of reality. Like the missing parts of a novel, it would explain these pages we are holding, the chapters of our lives.

Second, it would speak to our hearts' deepest desires. If nature makes nothing in vain, then why the human heart? Why those universal longings and desires? The secret simply couldn't be true unless it contained the best parts of the stories that you love.

Yet it would also need to go deeper and higher than any of them alone.

Christianity claims to do that for us.

Not the Christianity of proper church attendance and good manners. Not the Christianity of holier-than-thou self-righteousness and dogmatism. Not another religion, thank God.

That is not Christianity. Oh, I know it's what most people, including the majority of Christians, think Christianity is all about. They are wrong. There is more. A lot more. And that more is what most of us have been longing for most of our lives.

A Story. An Epic.

Something hidden in the ancient past.

Something dangerous now unfolding.

Something waiting in the future for us to discover.

Some crucial role for us to play.

Christianity, in its true form, tells us that there is an Author and that he is good, the essence of all that is good and beautiful and true, for he is the source of all these things. It tells us that he has set our hearts' longings within us, for he has made us to live in an Epic. It warns that the truth is always in danger of being twisted and corrupted and stolen from us because there is a Villain in the Story who hates our hearts and wants to destroy us. It calls us up into a Story that is truer and deeper than any other, and assures us that there we will find the meaning of our lives.

What if?

What if all the great stories that have ever moved you, brought you joy or tears - what if they are telling you something about the true Story into which you were born, the Epic into which you have been cast?

We won't begin to understand our lives, or what this so-called gospel is that Christianity speaks of, until we understand the Story in which we have found ourselves. For when you were born, you were born into an Epic that has already been under way for quite some time. It is a Story of beauty and intimacy and adventure, a Story of danger and loss and heroism and betrayal.

"It is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful things too. It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil, love against hate, order against chaos, in a great struggle where often it is hard to be sure who belongs to which side because appearances are endlessly deceptive. Yet for all its confusion and wildness, it is a world where the battle goes ultimately to the good, who live happily ever after, and where in the long run everybody, good and evil alike, becomes known by his true name... That is the fairy tale of the Gospel with, of course, one crucial difference from all other fairy tales, which is that the claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and it happening still." (Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth)

But I rush ahead. Let's discover the Epic for ourselves.

Sadly, there are lot of people out there who, in search of success and the feeding of egocentricity, reduce life's secret to a certain law, a certain formula, that when applied, assures you success in life.

Uncover that relationship that you can have with life's Author... and you'll understand that the secret isn't very much a secret at all.

And because of that restored intimacy, you know you can live a life that'll absorb all the fun but also weather all storms, because you know you have an Author whom you can trust, even in times when you cannot understand why things have to happen in a certain way.

Even if your family's striken with many diseases.

Even if a love one passes on suddenly.

Even if you do badly in your exams, projects, etc.

It's really like the ultimate insurance against all of life's what if's.

Yes... there'll be times we may be sad still. Lonely. Depressed. Grieve... but we can learn to move on because of that Relationship.

Not to mention that we'll all get to meet our loved ones who've passed on once again when the time comes.

:)

I confess that I haven't been reading His word... nor have I taken prayer very seriously lately. It's ironic yet predictable that man tends to do things out of his own strength - there're so many burdens upon my shoulders and all I do is to harp over them and think if I can do anything within my capacity to make a change, even in the case of bringing loved ones to Christ.

Today I felt a great surge inside as I stood by the shelves containing books on prayer.

I'm reminded again that the greatest action I can ever take... is to pray.

And to believe that One day Pa will make things beautiful in His timing... that those whom I will commit to pray for will one day enter into this relationship with Him that satisfies, that they'll grow... and live fruitful and purposeful lives in Him.

And hur... I think I really need strength and commitment that only He can give... since I foresee more names, more people to know in the years to come.

To my dear... I think I know the answer to the question you asked after watching that film many weeks back... finally. :)