I was never that much of a fan of fiction (though I do have two novels published on Kindle, with the kind help of Carol Ashby), but recently a friend prevailed upon me to give Tom Clancy a try.
And he's good. The stories are well-thought-out, interweaving plot lines leading to a climax that is satisfying, tying up each loose end, except for some that are meant for the next book in its sequence.
But...life isn't like that, at least from the perspective of we who live ours.
Things start and stop, and leave a wake that is a question-mark on our time here.
Ordinarily, that's fine, and the purpose of reading fiction, beyond entertainment, is to try to see a kind of order, God's purpose writ small by a human author, if you will.
But sometimes we're past that, and we're dealing with the tag-ends of a life that no longer seems to be capable of following a plan, and we may therefore feel that something's gone very wrong, something that can't be fixed.
The stories become more real than our own, and better than our own.
And we feel like driftwood on the stormy wave.
And here, though it's hard, we have to fall back on God's ways not being our ways, His thoughts not being our thoughts.
Antoine de St. Exupéry said it well in Polite de Guerre (published in English as Flight to Arras):
We are individual stones in a mighty edifice, whose completed design we shall need more time and more peace to see in its proper perspective.
Our stories seem to have no arc,
no plot-line with its steady flow.
We wander sometimes the dark
through a land we do not know,
ushered onward by a fate
sightless as Mr. Magoo,
pushing hard on every gate
which we must pull, that we go through.
But we may, in the dark of night,
when pain and fear cut to the bone,
catch the bright and fleeting sight
of Purpose beyond our own
that in time we will stand among
the heirs to Our Lord's Kingdom Come.
The Five Minute Friday prompt this week is THRILL.
Tom Clancy's books can be a thrill
(they're techno-thrillers, after all!),
a ride down a Death Mountain hill
into what seems a solid wall
of danger and of dreadful fate,
with pain and loss along the way,
and just before it seems too late
the hero comes to save the day,
which, when it is given thought,
is like our Christianity.
Our putrid sins, they really ought
to damn us for eternity,
but in our place the Saviour stands,
His death to place us in God's hands.
Sylvia sometimes thinks she is fortunate that she can't read.
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