I remember taking a college psychology class and learning about how George Lucas used some of Carl Jung’s psychology to create his Star Wars world. I thought that was really interesting, but I was never into any sort of fantasy books or movies until I had kids. Then I had a boy who LOVES everything fantasy. From Star Wars to DC and Marvel superheroes to Labyrinth, this kid is a total fan of far-off worlds. It’s fascinating to see what humans can create. But it’s not just fantasy authors that create their own rules and universes and good guys and bad guys, it’s every author who’s ever written or told a story. And God is the greatest author of them all.
When an author sits down to write a story, they have to decide a lot more than what we see on the pages. Not only are they telling us what happened, they’re putting it into a certain place and time, with characters who must live by certain rules, consequences, hopes, dreams, fears, needs, and wants. When we read a story or watch a movie, we pick up on these aspects pretty quickly, even if they are not explicitly stated. And when we see the characters making choices, we try to predict what’s going to happen next. Sometimes we are right; sometimes something totally unexpected happens.
These dream worlds are a lot like our own world. We have rules and consequences, hopes and dreams, fears, needs, and wants. We make choices and try to predict the outcome. But many of us forget that we also have an author! We have someone who dreamed us up, along with our world and everything in it. And not only that – He actually CREATED everything that he dreamed of! He didn’t just write it down, he made it happen. He brought it to life! And yet, we seem to forget that He’s there much of the time.
Unlike when we watch a movie or read a book and accept the way the author’s world is set up, we QUESTION everything our author has made! We balk at rules and consequences. We want to make our own rules! We are offended at the way things work, and we want to change them! We know better than the author! We should have written this book! If we don’t understand something, we think we need to fix it, rather than trust our creator’s judgement and timing. We want everything revealed to us right now! We don’t want to wait until the end of the book!
But maybe instead of fighting our author every step of the way, we could try approaching life as if it were a bestselling fiction novel by our favorite author, or a blockbuster movie by our favorite director. We could savor every page. We could hang on every word. We could marvel at the complexity of the characters. We could explain to others the rules and consequences of this universe the Author has created. We could defend His artistic choices till we’re blue in the face.
“What a genius!” we might say.
“I have followed his work for years!”
“I can’t wait for the sequel!”
“His story lines are soooo interesting!”
“His timing is perfect!”
“I could read this a million times and not get tired of it!”
“How can you question perfection?”