thoughts

There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else.

C.S. Lewis

The Problem of Pain

Danger vs. Safety. The Known vs. The Unknown. Courage vs. Fear.

Are certain people geared for the unknown? And the rest relegated to comparative boringness?

Couple thoughts. Have you ever read The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien? There has always been a scene in the story that has struck me as powerful. Gandalf shows up and 'prophecies' over Bilbo these words: There is more to you than you know. He said this, knowing that within the hobbit's veins coursed two kinds of blood.

There was the Baggins side: known for the expected, the reasonable, the 'normal, the 'don't rock the boat' and safe attitude.

And then there was the Took side: the adventurous, the danger loving, risk taking, dreaming, 'swashbuckling' and roll the dice hunger.

You and I are exactly the same. Two blood lines. And two tendencies. We live with the reality of the human and of the divine...regardless of whether we are aware of it or not. I think the problem we have is that most of time we live burrowed away in our hobbit holes and don't give a thought to our heritage.

Bilbo didn't. At least not until Gandalf showed up...and he showed up at the front door of Bilbo's hobbit hole...and before Bilbo could get the door shut a dozen motley dwarves were there too...and at the swinging of a door, Bilbo's life would never be the same. Suddenly he found himself entertaining people(dwarves) he did not want to entertain, feeding who he did not want to feed, listening to things he had no interest in, spending energy he could and would have much rather spent on something much more worth while. Yet, after plopping himself down on the hearth in front of his fire, exhausted, he heard something. The dwarves began to sing an ancient song, and as he listened "something tookish woke up inside of him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking stick."

Certain movies do it to me. examples? Remember the Titans. Cinderella Man. Rent. It's a Wonderful Life. The list is endless.

Music does it. examples? O Canada when Celine Dion sings it. Planet Shaker's Send Me. Rachmaninoff's Vespers. Dream Theater's Metropolis. Linkin Park's On the Inside.

Writing does it. Rudyard Kipling's IF. Ranier Maria Rilke's The Man Watching. Anything Michael Frost or Erwin McManus write. Or the current book I am reading: Getting to Maybe by Westley, Zimmerman and Patton. Incredible. You wanna know about it, send me an email.

Any stage play does it. Sitting there, in any of these environments, and something 'tookish' awakes in me, a "sleepy-eyes awareness that this is more to me than I know". And in a moment I am ready to grab a sword and take on the world...I'm ready to leave my cozy little hide and, as my daughter often says, go on a 'venture!

Its like a dormant gene that awakens. All of us have it. Art, literature, music, situations, and people awaken us to the alluring beauty of that destiny.

C.S. Lewis points something out though:

The book or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was a longing...they are not the think itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have yet to visit.

The Baggins side of me wants nothing of this. It wants safe, snug with an inside door knob that locks the world out and is in my control. Another part of me wants more. To see more. To hear more. To explore more.

To be more. and that is the mark of Jesus in all of us. In the Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan says it like this: You would not have called to me, if I had not been calling you. The theologian von Hugel says it this way: God is always previous. John, the apostle: We love because He first loved us.

And so, my question on this early Thursday morning: What are you ignoring that is stirring from the 'tookish' side? What is outside your door? What journey is before you? That longing that you have been trying to bury. It ain't going away. So...

Put down the walking stick. Strap on the sword. Great adventure awaits.

dreamin.

J