Drama

I've never read C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia. (GASP) I just haven't. My mom read them to my sisters and me when we were young. But I couldn't get in to them even when I knew I should be. I read A Wrinkle in Time about seven times in Jr. High. I understood each word, but the sentences lost there meaning. Charles Wallace never did anything for me. I was not engaged. But I knew there was hype, my best friend loved the book. After all, it had won a Newberry Medal, but I just didn't get it. I was not interested in books about other worlds, Mists of Avalon, King Arthur, Tolkien. Harry Potter- BAH! I had enough trouble understanding the world in which I lived.

I remember the first time I thought that it wasn't fair that I was alive. I didn't ask to be alive, and now, there was nothing I could do about it. I was stuck here, on earth, as a nine-year-old with two sisters that I didn't always like (why couldn't I have been an only child?). I was the chubbiest girl in gymnastics and felt awkward in my leopard print leotard. I wanted the lead in our community theatre production of The Worst Christmas Pageant Ever, but was cast as an angel instead. I was too tall and too big, appearing more adult-like than childlike. I threw hairbrushes and liked to backtalk. I lived on a farm and didn't even have a horse, just stupid cows that didn't do anything fun.

There was no way out. And even now, sometimes I still don't get it. I understand things will and do happen to all of us that are miserable and terrible and bring lots of pain, sometimes for years. But I want to make sense of it all.

I don't blame God. The way I see it, why not me? Bad things happen every day to someone. I just wish I could wrap my brain around the supernatural. The way it all works out. But that will never happen.

I am drawn to books and reading, one- because I write, but two- because there is drama. There is a plot, tension, climax, resolution. Something happens. If nothing happened then the book would fail; there is no story, there is no change, there is nothing worth telling. The same is true about life. We thrive on drama. And that is part of the reason I didn't get Madeleine L'Engle. I had a problem with the story. I didn't get it.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Matt. 6:34