The Leaping Rabbit

I have always loved stories. I was three years old when I decided I wanted to be a writer. It was about the same time that I decided to follow Jesus. Alt hough I have defined myself as both “writer” and “Christian” for nearly as long as I can remember, I saw little relation between the two during my early years. As I read and wrote stories, I found space for my imagination to roam. I soaked up poems and fairy tales; I poured out ideas in words and pictures. At the same time, I felt the weight of the command to seek God first, but Christianity felt constraining, like a list of rules I had to follow.  Little did I know that God was drawing me to him, telling me his story in ways I least expected.

As a five-year-old, I was enchanted by stories of Narnia. As a nine-year-old, I found a depth of meaning in Madeleine L’Engle’s stories that rang true, even though I could not fully comprehend it. As a teenager, I was drawn back to the fairy tales, myths, and archetypal imagery that had shaped my favorite stories. During college I fell in love with character-driven realism, metaphysical poetry, and the deftly crafted essays of nature writers. As the years went by, I grew increasingly aware that God was using stories to show himself to me.  He revealed himself in the beautiful wildness of Aslan. Through Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quartet, he showed me a love strong enough to defeat darkness. He led me to revisit fairy tales, where I found worlds flooded with significance, where the consequences of selfishness were severe, but where love had transformative powers. They were worlds where people’s choices determined what they would become. In novels, poetry, and essays, I caught glimpses of God’s grandeur.

As time went by, I began to see that Christianity was more like a story than a list of rules and constraints. I found the same sharp flavor of adventure in Bible stories that I found in my favorite novels. I am not sure where I got the idea that faith is a set of rules, but I know it is a lie that many fall into as they pursue a life of faith. We find it hard to understand righteousness apart from a list of dos and don’ts. We know God demands holiness of us. God asks us to be righteous and just. We feel the need to create a manageable list of behaviors, so we can measure our level of righteousness. I used to worry that creativity might take me outside the boundaries of God’s truth, into the realm of the unacceptable, even the blasphemous. As my faith has grown, I have come to realize that God is huge. In him, there is vast space for creativity. I want to keep myself grounded in his truth, not twisting it or denying it in any way, but I see now that there is freedom in truth. God will always be bigger than my imagination; I don’t have to downsize my imagination to keep it that way.