"Fantasy......"

Yesterday afternoon I took my granddaughter and her younger brother to see the second edition of that magical mayhem known as the “Smurfs”, little blue men battling a self-centered dolt of a wizard who is bent on extracting their essence for the power it brings to him. Noah laughed to the extent of almost falling out of his seat. Other than the spells that turn men into ducks and giant toads, the plot portrays no evil in the sense of there being a “dark side”. To be truthful, it wouldn’t have bothered me if it did. I want them to understand that there is, indeed, such a force in this life, to know it in terms of how it can come against us, and to recognize that their best defense is that anchor-line given us in Christ. While it does seem to me that Hollywood fills the screen with much that adults, let alone children, shouldn’t be mentally digesting, yet my best defense against the industry’s freedom to do so is a mind connected to Him. What’s more: it is my responsibility to teach my family as we go, not by some rigid enforcement of my theology, but by acquainting them with the reality of what He brings unto us via the Holy Ghost. It is not me, “super-saint, holier-than-thou with all the answers”, that I want them to see, but the person I am, human in my existence, His indwelling my true source of life. When church becomes a fairytale, when our denominational doctrines atrophy into nothing more a belief we hold and attempt to enforce upon others, all that is left is a ritual. When His presence in our midst evolves into an encounter where there is no reverence for the event and little learned afterward of the grace we have been given, surely we must ask ourselves who is creating whom. Most certainly, it is a stumble. Kid’s, however, people in general, can deal with the facts…and grow.