This film was quite wonderful. Enjoy it if you get the chance.

**trailer**

What is it about a good epic film that can really draw us in?

I read this exerpt in Eugene Peterson's fairly recent publication entitled Eat This Book. It helps to explain a little more the power of a narrative. So here's some food for thought.

Have you ever noticed that there is something powerful about a story? They don't just tell us something and leave it there, they invite us to participate. A good writer gathers us into the story. We feel the emotions, get caught up in the drama, identify with the characters, see into nooks and crannies of life that we had overlooked, realize that there is more to this business of being human than we had yet explored. If the storyteller is good, doors and windows open.

Honest stories respect our freedom; they don't manipulate us, don't force us, don't distract us from life. They bring us into the spacious world in which God creates and saves and blesses. First through our imaginations and then through faith--imaginations and faith are close kin--they offer us a place in the story, invite us into this large story that takes place under the broad skies of God's purposes, in contrast to the gossipy anecdotes that we cook up on a hot plate in the stuffy closet of self.

Not all stories of course are honest. There are sentimentalizing stories that seduce us into escaping from life; there are propagandistic stories that attempt to enlist us in a cause or bully us into a sterotyped response;trivializing stories that represent life as merely cute or diverting.

The Christian life requires a form adequate to its content, a form that is at home in the Christian revelation and that respects each person's dignity and freedom with plenty of room for all our quirks and particularities. Story provides that form. The biblical story invites us in as participants in something larger than our sin-defined needs, into something truer than our culture-stunted ambitions. We enter these stories and recognize ourselves as participants, whether willing or unwilling, in the life of God.