I’ve heard it is good to Start With Why and so here I am.

When I was a child, my mother read aloud to me and my brothers (Thanks, Mom!) One of the very many books she read was the C.S. Lewis classic The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Later she would read the whole series to us, but I always had just a little more love in my heart for the first book. Our family owned a cassette audio book of Wardrobe, which I listened to at night before bed so often I likely wore it out. I read the series myself later in grade school, and again in high school. Then I set it aside for many years. I believe I read the series once more as a young adult, but at that point in my life reading took a back seat to work, school, and the general busyness of life.

A couple of months ago I picked up Wardrobe again and read it for the first time in many years, and found the story was not only as good as I remembered, but better. Then I continued right into the rest of the series, and was reminded that this was one of the lessons Lewis put right into the books: When Lucy encounters Aslan in Prince Caspian, she finds him bigger than he was before. Alsan explains that he is no bigger, but that she is older and can see more of him. She has witnessed more of the story, and the Author looks just a little bigger and more impressive. This is a very Lewisian theme, appearing in The Great Divorce as well as the final book of the Narnia series The Last Battle, where he imagines heaven as a never ending revelation of better and better versions of the world we know as one goes further up and further in.

But all this could just mean Lewis was a great writer (he was), and it certainly does not hold true for every story I loved as a child. I once made the great mistake of rewatching Goonies, a movie I very much enjoyed as a grade schooler in the late 1980s. Let us just say it was not better than I remembered. Many of us have the latter experience. Disappointment that the things we remember as wondrous are, once we have grown, revealed as shams or at the least of low quality. The world of advertising and mass marketing have raised the bar on this disappointment- by promising more than it can possibly deliver, our consumer culture has made disappointment and doubt at least daily experiences. It has become so ubiquitous that we have automatic mental filters so we don’t get too despondent- no one really expects their food to look like the menu picture, their cologne to make them into Daniel Craig, or their lenovo laptop to make them into a jet-setting business executive. Well, maybe that last one, though why that is an appealing life I don’t understand. In any event, the point is that we spend our lives being disappointed. First we dislike it, then we accept it, and finally we expect it. The story is worse than it appears, and likely even worse than we think it is.

I don’t know about you, but this world is not good enough for me. The story being told is that disappointment is normal, that dishonesty is acceptable, and that our best move is to adopt a buyer beware attitude, spending our lives with shields up against the constant barrage of lies that has become the normal way of interacting in our culture. I am uninterested in this story if there is a better one available.

Over against our cultural story I would set another story, one that ironically is often touted as the origin story for our culture. Yes, I am talking about the Christian Bible.

I’ve been reading or hearing the stories in the Bible for literally my entire life. My parents were Bible College students when I was born. I’m fairly sure my first Sunday in church was my first Sunday on Earth. You would think I’d have the whole thing pretty much nailed by now.

But here is what I have observed: In the same way that the The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe got better when, after an absence of years, I picked it up and read it again, so the story told in the Bible gets better the longer I live and the more I understand it. Note that I carefully use the singular for the Biblical story. It is an undeniable truth that some of the individual stories taken out of the Bible have gotten worse the more I understand them. But the whole story, the one that forms the foundation of thousands of years of Christian practice- that story is better than you or I think it is. I have become convinced, and hope you will too, that no matter how good I believe the story to be, it is better still.