Toy Stories

Almost everyone has seen or heard of the Disney series of movies featuring a young boy, Andy, and his assortment of toys which come to life to help protect Andy and themselves from a world full of danger.  I was reminded of the movies this week as our small group continues with CS Lewis’s book, Mere Christianity. Towards the end of the book, CS Lewis tells a similar story. The boy, who I will call Andy, has a collection of tin soldiers that one day come to life, but their life is conflicted because they cannot understand the new world into which they have been born. They reject the feel of their soft flesh and yearn for the strength of their armor.  Andy sees their struggle. His love for the new creatures is unimaginable.  He wants them to know all that the new world has to offer them, and he wants them to love him in return. But the only way for him to do that is for him to become one of them. The gut-wrenching part is that Andy knows that some of the tin soldiers will reject him and likely kill him. But out of his love for them, he goes anyway. The toy story plays out as expected.  Many of the tin soldiers reject all that Andy has to tell them about the new world, and they conspire to kill him, and succeed. But a small group of soldiers believe, understand and love Andy. And from that moment on, they become a sort of secret society, infected by the knowledge of what Andy has explained to them, with their only mission being to tell everyone they know about the new world that they were meant for.