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Notes - Email - Serious Rings - Fun Rings The Lighted Path - Design - Host |
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Children's stories. . . Watching Return to Neverland is quite an experience. It tells of Wendy's daughter, Jane, and the misery of war in London in WWII. Like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, it is the escape-story of a child who needs to be reminded that the world is not all evil, and that pain is not forever. And in the process of remembering those things, and reviving stories in their hearts, they grow a bit more toward adulthood. The movie makes me cry at the beginning, because of the ravages of war on London, and the ravages of the same war on the heart of a little girl. She stops being a child, but has no time to grow into her new responsibilities. I'm sure there are those who can identify with that. I know I can. She learns too much about the bad things in the world, before she's finished fully learning about that which is good; before belief in love, in life, is second nature, rather than an act of will. Then she's swept away to Neverland, by an evil man who has always been part of the stories her mother tells. She goes, and meets the heroes of the stories she's always heard her mother tell, but since she's forgotten how to believe in them, she doesn't believe even her own eyes at first now. But she learns. Even the stories that aren't true, they are true, many of them, at their core, where it matters. A story doesn't need to be centered on factual events to be a true story . . . it just has to have a true heart. The end gets me as well. Wendy meeting Peter again is a powerfully emotional moment for me. My survival as a child was hinged on the stories I read. They kept me grounded in reality, odd as that sounds. They kept me sane, kept me from dwelling on the bad things in my life, and never let me forget that as things had been, they would be again. Let me see in my heart, in the back of my mind, that God is good, and good will triumph, even when I was denying God to His face. Even when I forgot what it was to know my Creator, and instead followed false images of Him. Even when I was wandering lost. Wendy met Peter again, and he thought she'd changed. She said "No! Never", and I know how she feels there too. I'm still struggling with the fact that, no matter how much older I get, I'm still the little girl who thrived on attention, who hid in the dark, who had a real-life boogieman she ran from, who talked to herself after bedtime to keep herself feeling alive. Who refused to relent to the pain and despair, without really knowing that that's what it was she was feeling. Who hoped that things would get better, but didn't know how it would happen. Even as a child, I put my faith in God, and He came through . . . and later, when I went seeking Him, I looked in the wrong places. Praise the Lord, though, that He is willing to forgive. He took a very broken child, and gave me new life. Put love in my path, and refused to let me ignore it, no matter that I tried. Yeah, I'm a sucker for a tear jerker. And they always get me thinking about my own experiences. Thank you for reading this, everyone. :) God Bless you all! Be God's! Joy
*corrected punctuation. . transfered from Word, and it came across weird*
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