Into an Epic

This week a friend, Sarah, and I went out for coffee as a break from schoolwork, and talked about, among many things, how life is an adventure.

I don’t mean that in the way you say “well, that was an adventure!” after something dumb happens and you don’t know what else to say. And I don’t mean just that interesting things happen.

I mean that life is like one of the epics we love so much. Stories like Narnia or Lord of the Rings. We have all been born into this great story that we can be a part of; a battle we can fight. I don’t mean that in the sort of melancholy “all the world’s a stage” way. It’s exciting to think of life as an epic, or this world as Narnia or Middle Earth, or something like that, where good and evil are personified in tangible characters to be fight with or against, and normal, ordinary people like us have extremely important roles to play in which they can prove themselves to be extraordinary.

But we never see it that way in real life.

Stories, tales, dragons…they’re all usually pushed aside as nothing really important or meaningful. They’re just entertainment. We don’t think that it’s possible for real life to be anything like those stories.

And by discounting the value of story and imagination, and what they mean for us in our lives and how we were created to live, we’re missing out on the best story ever told.

I was thinking about that, and about an image Sarah had had and had done a quick sketch of in her sketchbook, of a little boy and his guardian angel, and this image come to mind, of a boy being sent out into the epic as a part of the story.

Sarah, I hope you don’t mind that I took your image and ran with it.

It’s also the first really successful drawing I’ve done without the use of outlines. Yay for progress.

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