The First Years

These are simply lines from the first chapter of C.S. Lewis’ “Surprised by Joy” that struck me as particularly beautiful, powerful and strongly poetic. I’ve arranged them in lines and have added and subtracted some punctuation to emphasize the language the way I read it.

 

Once, in those very early days

my brother brought into the nursery

the lid of a biscuit tin, which he had

covered with moss,

garnished with twigs

and flowers so as to make it

a toy garden or toy forest.

 

That was the first beauty I ever knew.

What the real garden had failed to do,

 

the toy garden did.

It made me aware of nature –

not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors,

but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant.

 

As long as I live,

my imagination

of Paradise will

retain something

of my brother’s

 

garden.

Mere Mortality

“The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship [ . . . ]. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.”

– C.S. Lewis

On the Friday of Heldenwoche (Heroes’ Week), the kids’ camp in Germany of which I had the privilege to be a part this summer, I had an epiphany that the point around which our team centered the camp – the fact that everyone can be a superhero by Christ’s life within us – is exactly the point that I had planned on making during the devotion I had been asked to lead that next morning. This is what I wrote in my journal as a rough draft of sorts for that devotion.

This past year, God began teaching me a lesson about having my identity in Christ and what that means for everyone. In the midst of a bout of depression, I heard the Lord say to me: Harman, you are My brother, My coheir; and you are more than a conquerer because of my life within you. This led me to Romans 8:15-17 & 35-39 (look it up, it’s good stuff, and keep your Bible handy, you’ll need it.)

We are sons and daughters of the MOST HIGH GOD – coheirs with Christ . . . if seems that “super-hero” is too tame of a word . . . Christ calls us by a much fiercer name that I think better sums up the power that we have only through Him. When debating with the Pharisees, Christ quotes Psalms 82:6, “I said, you are gods/ you are the sons of the Most High”.

Indeed, we are the image-bearers of YHWH – the pinnacle of creation. In Ephesians, Paul tells us of the power that comes with the indwelling Holy Spirit – the power that comes with this sonship and daughtership. (Now you need to look up Ephesians 1:18-23.)

Here Paul explains that the Holy Spirit of Power that raised Christ from the dead lives within us, and thereby we have been given that selfsame power – NOT, I stress, by our own strength, but by the power of our Head – under whose feet God has placed all things.

So who is the “super-hero”?

We are. We are each super-heroes; gods in the likeness of the Most High; sons and daughters of the King whose kingdom is coming! This is our identity – we are co-heirs and more than conquerers because of the Power that lives within us.

But don’t get me wrong – we are not gods of our own making. We are nothing without our Savior God. NOTHING. Yesterday we taught the kids a memory verse. “Denn alles ist mir moeglich durch Jesus Christus, der mir die Kraft gibt, die ich brauche!” (“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”) The emphasis here is not on “I” or “all things”, as we like to think. No, it’s on “Christ, who strengthens me”. It is because of Christ that we are sons and daughters, it is by Him that we cry “Abba, Father!”

This is our hope, the blessed hope known only to those who know Christ: that He, by His death and resurrection, has redeemed us and taken our sins away. But furthermore, He has given us the Kingdom – that we may be called sons and daughters of the Most High.

Dragons: The reason behind the blog

“Because I want to remember what you say, right now.”
That, my friends, is my favorite line in my favorite movie. How to Train Your Dragon: pure genius. I’m not sure whether or not the writers meant for that line to be as weighty as I find it to be, but whenever Astrid says it, I get shivers down my spine.
Let me give you a bit of background: Hiccup (the main character) is at wit’s end. His best friend, Toothless the Night Fury dragon, has just been captured and is being driven toward his doom by Hiccup’s father who has just disowned him. He has been unofficially, but effectively, banished from his village all because he couldn’t – no, wouldn’t – kill Toothless when he first found him, like every other Viking would have. He stands on a cliff watching as Toothless is carried into the unknown, almost certainly to his death and the death of all of Hiccup’s people. Beside him is Astrid, Hiccup’s dream-girl, the incredibly beautiful, ever-witty, thick-skinned-yet-strong-hearted Viking girl who is the only other person to know Toothless as Hiccup has.
In this scene, Astrid is pushing Hiccup to be the man and the hero that she knows him to be. She asks him why it is that he wouldn’t kill a dragon, and frustrated beyond belief, Hiccup challenges her, asking her why it’s so important. To which she responds with the quote with which I began this post.
“Because I want to remember what you say, right now.”
I love it. But why?
This is the kind of woman that every man needs and longs for. Not only a woman for whom he can fight, but one that will push him to be the hero he is – but maybe that which he’s afraid to be. She believes in him; she clings to every word he says, pushing him to grow, to change for the better, to become a hero. Throughout the movie, Astrid defies the typical feminine archetype in fairy tales, instead of simply being rescued by her hero, by also joining the fight with him, supporting him and believing in him.
She is asking him for his strength. She needs him to be a leader, to be her hero. This is one of the deepest fibers in every man’s heart: the desire to be his woman’s hero. Whenever I hear that line in the movie, something inside of me stirs, and I think, “I want my woman to say that to me.” I get fired up. I’m ready to conquer the world. Why? Because she believes in me. And while she needs him to lead her, without her, he would never have left that cliffside. Just as she needs him, he needs her. The relationship is mutual.
After Astrid makes the above comment, Hiccup, still self-deprecating and flustered, points out that after four hundred years, he’s the first Viking that wouldn’t kill a dragon. And then Astrid cuts to the chase: “First to ride one, though.”
She believes in him.
She showed him that what he thinks – what he says – really, truly means something to her. That he is something, someone. That simply because of who he is, he is a hero.
And this belief in him, this ability of hers to see him as the hero he is and to be able to push him to be it, is what drives Hiccup to rescue Toothless and his entire Viking clan from the Green Death.
I watched this movie last night, and it had to have been the hundredth time I’ve seen it, but that line still moves me. So much so that I had to make a blog to write about it. I hope that I haven’t bored you, but if I have, prepare to be bored by more random thoughts, some poetry, and maybe a short story or two!