Thursday, July 9, 2009

What I've Been Learning/Considering Lately

At camp Luke talked about offering God yourself daily, and that is something that has really stuck with me since he said it. In the morning it is refreshing and helps my confidence in dealing with sin in my life to offer myself to God.

I've been genuinely afraid that I'm going to fall into the same sinful routine that I was in before camp that I was convicted of. I've failed so many times before. Please pray for me.

I need to be content. I worry too much about the future and social things and other pointless human problems like that. I should be focusing on loving like I'm called to do, worshiping like I'm called to do, and sharing like I'm called to do.

Life can and probably should be so much simpler.

Just because I reach a conclusion on everything doesn't mean that it's the correct one. I make so many mistakes!

Things I'm guilty of knocking before I've tried them: Christian rap. The Shack.

Random Tangent: We we're talking tonight at the TNT afterparty about how The Chronicles of Narnia are okay allegorically while The Shack isn't. I was just thinking about all the things that are sketchy in Narnia (but I still love it). Lucy and Susan definitely party with Aslan and Baccus (basically the god of drunken partying), at the end of The Last Battle, a Calormene soldier goes to 'Heaven' because he lived like a follower of Aslan would live, even though he did all of those things in the name of Tash (basically the Narnian version of satan). Basically: There's a reason it's called fiction.

Thoughts on any of this?

2 comments:

Andrew said...

The Chronicles of Narnia aren't allegory. It's a minor quibble, but Lewis never intended them to be taken allegorically (and said so). His point was basically that if there were such a world as Narnia, this might be how God chose to save it. It was more a parallel universe thing (and they refer to Jesus at least once that I can remember in The Last Battle). He did the same thing in The Space Trilogy though he made it more clear. Mars was a world to which evil had come and been rejected, Earth was a world in which evil had come and been accepted and Venus was a place where evil had not yet come.

Lewis was all about imagination. It probably had to do with his being Irish, but you always get the sense that there was a little part of him that wanted to believe, almost to the point of actually believing, in fairy tales. Narnia gave homage to his love of the other-worlds of fantasy, and he used it to imagine God's redemption plan as it might be in another world. Allegory uses fantastical elements to show how things are in our world, and Lewis had no interest in that, at least in these books.

Sorry to go on and on about that. For what it's worth, I think Narnia trumps the crap out of The Shack.

Zach said...

I know they weren't specifically written as an allegory, but we were more talking about the allegorical charistics. That was actually what we decided on: Narnia is fine because it wasn't written as an allegory specifically, but that it just had parallels to Christian beliefs, while the Shack isn't so good because it was written specifically for allegorical purpose while still being incorrect in some ways. But then again, I'm just taking Trey, Callie, and Riley's words for it cause I haven't read it.

Lewis' inclusion of so many fantasy characteristics is one of my favorite things about The Chronicles of Narnia