Live Inside This Story With Everything You Have

”If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”*

— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

”All heroes are shadows of Christ.”

— John Piper

Dear girls,

Have you ever had a moment, sitting in a dark theater, or reading alone somewhere, where a scene from a film or a line in a book hit you somewhere you weren’t expecting? Something that made your heart catch in your chest, took your breath away, and left you with the feeling that you were somehow part of something really, really big?

C.S. Lewis talks about something like this. As a little boy, playing with his imaginary world of Boxen, he experienced a certain joy that seemed to be connected to another world, a longing he could never quite locate or satisfy. He wrote about it later in his book Surprised by Joy, and elsewhere he put it this way: if I find in myself a longing that no earthly pleasure can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

I know exactly what he means. And I can tell you precisely when I first felt it.

It was 1978. My dad took my older brother and me to a movie theater in Lincoln, Nebraska, to see a film that had been in theaters about a year by then but had already become something of a phenomenon. Star Wars. Now, I want you to understand: I was a red-blooded, all-American boy. And so you would think that the scene permanently branded on my memory would be the lightsaber showdown between Ben Kenobi and Darth Vader, or the final moment where Luke successfully destroys the Death Star in a blaze of triumph. Those are the action scenes. Those are the scenes a boy is supposed to remember.

But no. More than any other scene, the one that is deliberately marked on my memory is this one: Princess Leia is sitting in a prison cell in cell block 9. The door opens. What appears to be a stormtrooper walks in. She sits up — smug, confident, completely unbothered — and says, “Aren’t you a little short to be a stormtrooper?” And then you hear a voice from under the helmet: “Oh, the helmet.” He pulls it off. And he looks at her and says nine words.

“I’m Luke Skywalker, and I’m here to rescue you.”

Something happened in me at that moment that I couldn’t have named if you’d asked me. For a long time I wondered about it: why that scene, of all scenes? I’ve come to believe it resonates for a handful of reasons. First, there’s conflict. Second, Luke is a hero — and he’s enduring that conflict for good and noble reasons, not selfish ones. And third, in the middle of that conflict, there is an experience of beauty.

Princess Leia was probably the first woman I ever noticed for her beauty; long brown hair, those big brown eyes, white robes, something that even then struck me as dignified and tender and lovely all at once. And I remember, as a kid, noticing she was pretty in a way that wasn’t yet corrupted into anything base or selfish. It was just wonder.

Conflict. A noble hero. And beauty. I didn’t have the categories for it then, but those are the three things that stirred in me, and I’ve been thinking about why ever since.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe.

I made a decision for faith when I was five years old. My pastor preached on hell, and his explanation was simple: hell is a place without God. I knew, with a child’s uncomplicated clarity, that I didn’t want to be anywhere without God. So I gave all that I was to who I understood Jesus to be — and I did it in my little brother’s room, which my dad had painted to resemble the forest from Winnie the Pooh. Which means that I accepted Christ as my Savior among the trees and animals of the Hundred Acre Wood. That itself is a great story.

What I intuitively understood then — and what the Lord has led me to believe more deeply ever since — is that there is a story that makes sense of the world, and it is the story of the Gospel.

Think about it this way. A long time ago — in a garden far, far away — human beings were in a place of paradise. They were in union with God and each other, with the environment and the animals and the whole created order. Everything was as it was meant to be. And then sin entered the world. Conflict entered the world. The man and the woman were separated from God and from each other in a way they had never been before. And instead of the story ending in hopelessness, a prophecy was given — of a future hero. Someone was going to come and set things right. Someone would come and save us all.

I wanted to be a hero. For most of my childhood, I wanted to be Luke Skywalker — the one who shows up and says the nine words. But as I got older, I came to realize something important: what I needed more than to be a hero was to be rescued. I needed a hero. I was the one in the cell. I was the one in the dark, and someone was going to have to come for me.

As John Piper once said: all heroes are shadows of Christ.

But here is the thing about this particular rescue that I spent years trying to fully absorb. Heroes in stories rescue victims. They rescue the captive, the oppressed, the wrongly imprisoned. That is the shape of every story I have ever loved — an innocent person in darkness, a hero who comes for them.

The Gospel does not have that shape.

The human race is not, in the Gospel, a blameless prisoner. We are not the wrongly accused. We chose the wrong side. In the garden, when the test came, we sided with the enemy. And when the King himself finally arrived — when he put on flesh and walked into his own creation — we handed him over to be executed. The Crucifixion was not perpetrated by one generation of one people two thousand years ago. It was the act of the whole human race, which had been declaring its rebellion against God since the very beginning. I was not just in the cell. I was, in some real sense, among the ones who put me there.

C.S. Lewis understood this. And so, I think, did he when he wrote the Narnia stories. There is a character named Edmund Pevensie who betrays his own brothers and sisters to the White Witch for some Turkish Delight. He sells out his family for almost nothing. And when Aslan dies on the Stone Table, he does not die for the brave or the faithful. He dies for the traitor. He gives everything — his life, his blood, his dignity — to buy back the one who deserved it least. That, Lewis is saying, is the actual shape of redemption. The rescue is not of an innocent victim. It is of the guilty party; the one who went over to the wrong side and has no claim whatsoever on mercy.

That is who we are. And that is who Jesus came for.

And this is where it gets interesting, because smart people have tried to use this against Christianity. Joseph Campbell, the great American mythologist who wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces, showed that the hero’s journey runs through virtually every culture in the world. You find dying-and-rising gods across ancient mythology: in the story of Osiris, in the myths of Adonis, in the Norse tales of Balder. And some people take this to mean that Christianity is not uniquely true, that it is merely one version of a universal human story, true in the way all myths are true, meaning and metaphor without historical fact.

This is roughly where C.S. Lewis stood before he became a Christian. He thought myth was merely metaphorically true, that it gave meaning, that it resonated, but that it had not actually happened.

Then one night, J.R.R. Tolkien, the man who gave us Middle-Earth, sat down with Lewis and made an argument that changed his life. Christianity, Tolkien said, is not unlike every other myth. It is exactly like every other myth, with one staggering difference: it actually happened. The myth became fact. God, the Author of all stories, wrote himself into his own story in real time, in real history, in the body of a real man named Jesus of Nazareth. Every dying-and-rising myth throughout history is a shadow — a rumor, you might say — of the one event that the universe had been building toward since the garden. The stories were not evidence against Christianity; they were evidence for it. The human heart, across every culture and every age, was reaching out toward something it could sense but not yet see.

And what it was reaching toward was him.

This is what the scholar John Woodhouse means when he says that the Bible tells the story that makes sense of the world. Not a story among stories. The story that gives all the other stories their meaning. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is one long, unfolding drama of rescue; God pursuing human beings who have declared themselves his enemies, working across centuries and generations to bring them home. The hero does not stay in heaven and send a message. He comes in person. He enters the prison cell. He pulls off the helmet. And he says: I’m here. I came for you.

I want to be honest with you about my faith, because I think you deserve honesty. Do I believe there are objective reasons to believe the Gospel; philosophical arguments for God’s existence, the necessity of moral revelation, the evidence for the resurrection that men like William Lane Craig have spent their lives assembling? Yes. I do. I find those arguments genuinely compelling. But at the deepest level, here is what I believe: the story of Christianity is the story that makes the most sense of the world. Not because it is emotionally satisfying — though it is. But because when you look honestly at the human experience, the universal longing for justice, the ache for beauty, the hunger to love and be loved, the fact that every culture in history has reached toward some version of sacrifice and redemption and new life — the Gospel is not one possible explanation among many. It is the explanation. It is the story all the other stories were trying to tell.

And here is what I want you to carry with you: your life is an epic. I mean that literally, not motivationally. Your life has (or will have) conflict; real conflict, the kind that does not resolve easily and does not spare you because you are good people. Your life has a longing to be heroic, to do something that matters, to stand for something worth standing for. And your life has, underneath all of that, a hunger to be rescued — a knowledge, felt in the bones before it is understood in the mind, that you cannot save yourself. All three of these things are written on the human heart. All three of them were stirred in me by nine words spoken by a young man in a stormtrooper helmet in a movie theater in Nebraska.

And all three of them — the conflict, the heroism, and the rescue — find their truest and fullest expression in the story of Jesus Christ.

Let the story be the story that guides your entire life; not from a safe distance, as a philosophy you find interesting but do not quite inhabit. The faith is not a private arrangement between you and God, held separately from any community or tradition. It never has been. Two thousand years of men and women have lived inside this story before you; they carried it forward, argued about it, suffered for it, and handed it on. That is the Church.

I should tell you that I grew up as an evangelical Protestant, and I entered the Catholic Church as an adult. One of the things that drew me there — among several — was a realization I could not shake: that the story the Gospel tells is not, at its deepest level, about God saving one person. It is about God saving a people. Jesus did not come merely to forgive sins privately and leave each soul to work it out alone. He established a Kingdom, entrusted it to apostles, and sent that apostolic line forward through every century in an unbroken succession of men who have carried the rescue into every generation. The Communion of Saints, all those people across the centuries who staked their lives on the truth of what Jesus did, are not a theological decoration. They are your family. When I finally understood that, the Catholic Church stopped looking like a religious institution and started looking like home.

It is the Body of Christ in the world, the community inside which the rescue continues to be enacted: in the sacraments, in the saints, in the long, tested, beautifully worn tradition of people who found it to be exactly sufficient. Let it make sense of your life. Not from the outside, but from the inside. The Bible tells the story that makes sense of the world, and the Church is where that story is lived. And I can do no better, as your father, than to tell you to live inside it with everything you have.

Peace to you, my little girls,

Dad