Truth In Storytelling

Truth in Storytelling

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own but will tell you what he has heard. He will tell you about the future. John 16:13

Over the years, Nathan’s family has enjoyed reading C. S. Lewis’s stories together. The Christian apologist wrote many serious expositions on faith. But his fictional works tell about our individual journeys of faith and the nature of our relationships with God as well as his apologetics do. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series is a great teaching tool for children when they reach an age when some of the lessons of faith will begin to take hold. After all, truth is truth.

Sometimes we create artificial barriers to learning more about God’s truth where there are none. We’ll read nonfiction books because we want to learn, or we read fiction because we want to “escape the real world.” In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lewis describes the main character, Eustace, as a boy who was so unimaginative that he “almost deserved [his name].”^a And then he runs up against a dragon. Like so many of us, Eustace was unprepared for the adventure, for the danger, for the challenges that encounter entailed:

Something was crawling. Worse still, something was coming out [of the cave]. Edmund or Lucy or you would have recognized it at once, but Eustace had read none of the right books. The thing that came out of the cave was something he had never even imagined.^b

God’s truth is all around us, and stories can teach us more of it. Great movies can move us and inspire us. Great books can give us reason to keep pressing on, to show kindness to another person, to recognize the frailty of a coworker or family member.

God is present all around us, showing us His truth in art and literature and many other places, if we are open and sensitive to His presence and workings. Don’t expect Him to be confined solely to a “serious” source.

Uncommon Key > God’s truth is all around you—and He will use whatever way He chooses to try to reach you with it. Look for it, and keep a weekly list of the surprising ways you discover His truth. (And read—or watch—The Chronicles of Narnia.)

^a C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (New York: Harper Trophy, 1980), 3.

^b Ibid., 82.