Steve West - Living in Story Book Land

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Wednesday, June 23rd. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. World commentator Steve West suggests that we recapture the wonder of childhood.

STEVE WEST, COMMENTATOR: Traveling home from a childhood visit with relatives in northern Virginia, my sister and I spotted a billboard advertising Story Book Land. We pleaded for my parents to take us. To our surprise, they turned off the highway. In what seemed a few miles, we reached the park. It was full of storybook characters set among a wood. A giant Mother Goose beckoned at the entrance. Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall. We saw the house of the three bears, a bridge across a stream, and an old woman in a shoe.

Story Book Land is largely forgotten now. It closed about 20 years after our visit. And by 2007, the whole area had been absorbed by a housing development. By then, the “magic forest of make-believe” was really gone.

If we’re honest, most of us would have to admit our own magic forest has been clearcut. Life is not enchanted but simply what it is: asphalt and concrete and steel. A never-completed to-do list. Death and taxes. We long ago lost our wonder.

Christians profess a belief in the supernatural, in an unseen reality. But we don't often act like it.

What if we took a different reading of Scripture? What if we read it as fairy tale, as a magical, astounding story of a giant felled by a young boy, of a great army put to run by angelic troops, of dead people coming back to life? As a world where rocks cry out, trees clap their hands, and mountains sing? And where, in the end, a magical, shining city comes down from the sky and heaven and earth become one. And no one dies. And no one cries.

J.R.R. Tolkien once said, "The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories.”

I confess that often when I read Scripture, the words lie on the page, two-dimensional and flat. But on occasion, on the days when I am best seeking and best seeing, the Bible becomes a Story Book Land. I marvel at our visitation by extraterrestrial Life. I am struck in wonder at the word or touch that heals and revives from a Being that deigns to take our form and walk among us, Spirit his way in and among us, unseen.

Story Book Land may be gone, plowed under by progress. But we can still walk in it. The Big Bad Wolf lurks. Humpty Dumpty has fallen and we still can’t put him back together. But Someone can. Someone who hasn’t gone away. Someone from a wilder and wider world who beckons us “come.”

I’m Steve West.

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