Drawn into the Story...

Two weeks ago I finished up my last class for the semester. The past nine-months of classes have been pretty reading intensive. Averaging about a book every week (sometimes two, if we're lucky), is quite a bit for me to keep up with.

As such, the past couple of years, I've come to look forward to the summer break in order to read the accumulating books on my have-not-yet-read shelf in my office. This week, as I traveled to Texas I picked up two books. One of them was from this shelf, the other was a lighter read from C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

On the plane, as I was reading, I was struck by one of the opening scenes. It's the scene where Eustace Scrubb and Lucy and Edmund Pevensive stare at a picture on a wall of a Narnian ship when suddenly the picture draws them into a whole new world.

Suddenly the picture on the wall comes alive and they begin to feel the breeze, smell the air, and hear sounds. The kids are magically drawn into the painting and find themselves in the waters, where they are helped into a boat with the enticing name The Dawn Treader. These kids, now in a new reality, travel to distant lands looking for the seven lost lords of Narnia. At the end of their adventures they find a lamb that turns into Aslan…

This is the sort of adventure with the bible that we are looking for, the adventure of staring at the Bible’s words on paper only to find ourselves drawn into the story itself.

The following is another favorite clip of my on this matter from the movie The Tale of Despaux.