My story part 1. As promised

My story is not a new story. Thousands upon thousands of pages have been inked, and sentences carefully crafted, to tell similar stories through books, scripts and songs. Gallons upon gallons of paint have been applied to countless canvases to express the parts of the story that words cannot explain. My story is the human story of the journey toward wholeness; the journey toward God.

One such script was written and directed by Jim Henson, of “Muppet” fame. In 1982, he released “The Dark Crystal,” a story in which a race of people are physically divided into two separate races, one totally good and one totally evil. This schism takes place when the “crystal of truth”, the force which binds everything together, is shattered. Dark and light are separated and the world is plunged into a reign of terror by the evil half of the once united pair.

While this film has often been derided by the Christian culture as expressing “new age” beliefs, I find that it has had lasting meaning for my Christian spiritual pilgrimage. I watched this movie when I was in the second grade – rather a treat for a family who struggled to keep food on the table. I remember sitting in the movie theater, front row center, neck straining to see the whole gigantic screen, and becoming lost in the story; lost in the struggle to unite again these two races into one flesh.

As a child, I found the story exciting, scary and fun all at the same time. As an adult, I find this story to be profound, but perhaps not in the way the writers intended. The film is filled with a strong new-age mysticism, bordering on over the top agenda-pushing. Still, the story resonates with me because this is my story. And between the pages of this script there lies a truth that has stayed with me into my adulthood: A fractured life is a life of destruction.

It has been said that a good story has many threads woven together like a tapestry - some dark and some light. Characters, innocence, tragedy, a journey toward resolution, are all individual parts of a larger picture. Lately, I have been thinking about a thread of my story that I had been avoiding.

I am not living in denial about anything (at least no more than the next person), it’s just that I have talked about it so much over the course of time that I am afraid of wearing it out, making it trite.

Yet, this one little piece of my story is so very key to who I am. It is the one piece of the puzzle of me that completes the picture, making sense of the chaos. It is the point at which I realized just how fractured my life was, and the beginning of a journey toward wholeness and health.

Question for you: What is the key part of your story? If you had to use a movie to explain your life - which one and why?