I call all times soon.

Obviously it's like a week late to be posting this, but I'm doing it anyway.

A year or so ago, there was a lot of fuss and hullabaloo about the Mayans predicting the world's end in 2012.


I remember first hearing about this - and thinking "Yeah. Riiiiight." The clips from the movie on youtube make the entire thing look even less realistic.

But the other day, I started hearing a lot about (you guessed it) May 21st, 2011. Which, might I add, was almost one week ago.

When I read the articles about it, I was kind of shocked. I mean, to hear other religions preach the end of the world is all good and well - I know it's bogus. They're just predicting that everything's gonna blow up, which as we know from the Bible is not the way it's going to happen.

But these were Christians - not just predicting the end of the world where everything explodes and we all die, but predicting Jesus' return. They were using scripture to back them up, talking about concepts, ideas, and beliefs that I was accustomed to.

My initial reaction was "this is ridiculous."

My second reaction was "what if they're...right?"

When I was little, a friend of mine asked me what the one thing I wanted to see before I died was - and I told her I wanted to see Jesus coming back.

But lately, Jesus' return has been more of an up-in-the-air sort of thing for me. (no pun intended ;) You know. This dreamy sort of over-the-rainbow-idea that Jesus is going to come back, flying in majestically in the clouds with trumpets.

I mean, really? It's all rather unrealistic, don't you think?

But lately I've been starting to come to terms with the fact that...God is so much bigger than my little "realistic" worldview.

Have you ever thought about the idea that God is real?

Wow, do I sound like a skeptic or what.

But what I mean, not just that you believe in Him - because God is so much more than just a belief. He...IS. He's as real as the trees, flowers, and grass that I can touch.

And one day, the GOD of the universe, in all His glory, power, majesty, and REAL-ness is going to come back to earth.

I guess, the powerful thing about these people's prediction was that: These are Christians. They (roughly) believe the same things that I do about Christ. And they are saying Jesus is coming back - tomorrow.

Would I be prepared? Was I ready?

I'm ashamed to say I probably wasn't. I went to bed thinking "Dear God, please don't come back tomorrow. I'm not ready yet."

Because, for a time, the idea of that....that *possibility* that Jesus could really come back was suddenly very real to me.

I mean, come on. We all know the Sunday school "Jesus could come back any day, and we just have to be ready." Sometimes we take it for granted. "Jesus could come back any day" gets a little bit old after awhile, you know?

But the weight of the...the reality. That Jesus WILL come back in a very physical, real form. It won't be some emotion, some spiritual mountaintop or a nice worship experience. He really IS coming.

Can you even *imagine* how glorious it would be to see Him come down from the clouds with trumpets?

So squash the stuff about the world ending. As one of my friends said the other day "the odds of Jesus returning on May 21st were just the same as they were on May 20th, and May 22nd."

We can predict it all we want, but Jesus is clear in the book of Matthew that "of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only. "

The thing is - it really *could* be tomorrow.

What if it was?

When He comes - can He say to me, "well done, good and faithful servant?"

Am I doing the most I can with what my Father has given me? Or am I wasting what I already have? Will the bridegroom come back to a bride who is not prepared to marry him - or will he come back to a bride who is ready, expectant, and completely in love with Him?

I guess the thing that stuck out to me with these people's prediction was that they were predicting something different from what most people do. And it made me realize the...kind of, reality, I guess, of Jesus' return.

My friend Shelby wrote a really amazing post on the subject, which you can read HERE.

Here's an excerpt of what she wrote:

"Live every moment like it could be your last, because it could be! Just stop and think. You can be prepared and be assured and live each minute safe in the arms of your Savior. You can use your life, your time, your resources to make an eternal impact. You can someday stand before God and hear Him tell you "Well done." You can be ready. Don't put it off. It is the one and only thing in this world that simply cannot wait."

I love this quote from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

[Aslan] ”Do not look so sad. We shall meet soon again.”

“Please, Aslan,” said Lucy, “what do you call soon?”

“I call all times soon,” said Aslan.

It could be today, it could be tomorrow, it could be a million years from now. Will you be ready?

It's radical...crazy...giving Christ my life. Completely. All of it. Absolutely every aspect...forever, always, every breath I breathe.

I like to imagine being absolutely in love with the man God has for me someday in the future. But what about the lover who gave His life for me, who loves me always, who is my strength, my all, my everything?

Can I honestly say - There is no one else who has my heart?

Listen to Absolutely, by Starfield

My little brother is cuter than yours.

During Bible reading this morning...

Mom: If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also.
John-Luke: What happens if you run out of clothes?

Mom: whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also.
John-Luke: Does that mean when you punch someone, you should always punch them twice?

l'éléphant

I was in the car with my mom, listening to the radio....and this speaker was talking about the sculpting of a famous statue. It reminded me of this one joke...

"How do you carve an elephant out of marble?"
"Well, you get a block of marble, and you start chipping away at everything that doesn't look like an elephant"

::tehe::

(image from amazon.com)

But the speaker was talking about how God is the sculptor, chipping away at us.

And I got to thinking. As God is carving me, am I letting Him chip away at everything that "doesn't look like an elephant"?

Jesus says "Be holy, as I am holy". We are to reflect Christ - but are we letting God purge us of the things that don't reflect Him, so that when the work is finished, all you will see is Christ?

Brother Lawrence, in The Practice of the Presence of God (amazing book) says (on attaining spiritual fulfillment)

To accomplish this, it is necessary for the heart to be emptied of everything that would offend God. He wants to possess our hearts completely. Before any work can be done in our souls, God must be totally in control...we need to abandon everything that isn't of God. Doesn't He deserve this and much more?

Like I was talking about in this post...there are so many things that take captive of our hearts instead of God.

What does your elephant look like so far? I don't know about you, but mine still has a lot of lumps of non-elephant-looking marble...

Re-Blog: This is the Title Page

This is a post my co-admin wrote for Aslan's Meditations on our website. (Aslan's Country) I absolutely love the way he put everything - it's short, but it's powerful.

Like a lot of you, I’ve been insanely busy this past school year... AP courses, chemistry, the list goes on... and that doesn’t even include the whole month-and-a-half of my life I (almost) entirely dedicated to promoting Voyage of the Dawn Treader and traveling to London for the premiere. Nor does that include the long laundry list of church and family events. No wonder it’s already May.

I love to think about eternity... how one day very soon those who choose to follow Christ will all live in eternity with God in Heaven. And when I think about eternity, it makes life on earth seem so trivial and relatively unimportant. I ask myself, “Why am I living for today? Why am I doing (or not doing) things because of the effect they will have right now? Shouldn’t I be living for something more?”

Yes.

You see, the mentality I think many of us have is that we live a good life on earth; then one day we die and eternity begins. But this is so far from the truth! Eternity starts now.

Think of it this way. Why would you live one day homeless if you had a Father who had a beautiful mansion and wanted you to live in it? In the same way, why would you live your earthly life pursuing worldly things when you have such a larger life to live?

I love how C.S. Lewis puts it in The Last Battle (scan from my first edition copy):

You see, our life on earth is only the title page of the great story of eternity. When you pick up a book, don’t you expect its title page to reflect the contents of its chapters? You wouldn’t expect a book about candy and delicious foods to have a title page that says “Poison,” would you? Just so, shouldn’t the title pages of our eternal lives reflect the greater purpose we live for?

This is a concept I love to think about, yet rarely carry through in my life. Just this morning, I was at a high school in town (I’m homeschooled) with eleven other students, anxiously awaiting the beginning of the AP U.S. History Exam. Believe me, that’s no easy exam. So there we were in the lobby, waiting for the doors to the exam room to open. The students were gathered around one of the teachers, who was attempting to go over a quick review of U.S. history with them. He began it like this.: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Suffice it to say that this was a very liberal school, and most people there were not interested in God, at least not in glorifying Him. Several times the students interjected “and Jesus” into a very warped retelling of U.S. history. I glanced away, shocked at their blindness. “How can you not see that you’re making fun of the Jesus who died to save you?!” I wanted to ask.

I’m not sure why I didn’t.

In truth, these students and teacher were exactly like the dwarfs in The Last Battle. They didn’t believe in Aslan, and they didn’t believe in Tash. “The dwarfs are for the dwarfs,” I could only imagine them saying next. There I was, in my Narnian armor, and yet I didn’t have the courage to speak up. “Oh,” I told myself, “that would only make me more nervous before the exam.” Perhaps it would have. But what’s an exam score in light of eternity? There were the students who were destined for hell, and here I was, worried about the details of the Vietnam War.

This is the title page.

Will the title page of my life be like this morning? Will I continue to live as a Christian who doesn’t speak up for my God, who did so much more than speak up for me when he died for me? Will I continue to create a title page that says “poison,” or will the title page of my life truly reflect the contents of my “Great Story”?

We should become more like Reepicheep---longing for Aslan’s Country, longing to see our Master’s face, living every second of our lives for one purpose alone: to make our title pages match the story of eternity.

What does your title page look like?

Images: Scans from my first edition of The Last Battle (except for the image of Reepicheep)

Jane Eyre.

If you felt relieved because I didn't geek out about Star Wars, I have to apologize. 'Cause I'm going to totally geek out on you here. ;)

A few weekends ago, I went to see Jane Eyre with a couple of friends. If you haven’t read the book, or you don’t like movie spoilers, you probably won’t get much out of this post. =P Prior to seeing it, I decided to read the book – and let me tell you, the book is probably the best novel I have read all year. If you haven’t read it, you need to. =P It is so beautifully written – the way the characters are built, the way the story unfolds, the style it's written in...::sigh::

Ahh…words do not describe how enthralled I was with this book.

The movie absolutely did justice to the book – and – (are you ready for this?) – it was better than Narnia.

::gasp::

Yes, friends.

Don’t worry, I still love Narnia. But Jane Eyre was so, so beautifully adapted into film that it made the Narnia films look wishy-washy.

Obviously Narnia is a fantasy and Jane Eyre is a romance, so Narnia is going to be a little harder to put on screen, and they're really incomparable to begin with. But Jane Eyre was done so well. And Narnia was just….not. (with the exception of the first film, which was probably done just as well as Jane Eyre.)

AHHH. I love this movie so much.

Okay, here are the spoilers and where I get all nerdy. 8)

Mia Wasikowska as Jane Eyre and Michael Fassbender as Mr. Rochester were pretty near perfect. We all agreed at the end that Mia was not as quick and sharp as she could have been, and Mr. Rochester not quite as firm and shameful in regard to Bertha Mason – but overall they did a beautiful, beautiful job. The depth of character, the fierceness, the passion – it was all there.

Tech-wise, it was a *little* lacking. There were too many close-ups, the camera was shaky at times, and the score didn’t always quite fit. But it was never enough to bother me too much – only enough to notice it a little. Not a major pitfall. (like it was in Dawn Treader. Dawn treader was just so clearly lacking in tech.)

I was delightfully pleased with how creepy it was, but I thought it could have been a lot more, and this is probably the only thing that bothered me. I pictured Bertha’s scream to be so, soooooo so much louder/eviler, and it was a sort of quiet chuckle – which didn’t do much justice to how fantastically horrified I was when I read the book. Whoever acted her was amazingly perfect though.

This ties into the one thing that I reeeeealllyyy wanted to see on screen that wasn’t: Bertha never came into Jane’s room and tore up her veil. To me, this was a really key part in Jane’s story. There wasn’t as much suspense or tension over Bertha being there, and I thought there should have been a lot more. I was also disappointed because in the trailer, there’s a line Jane says: “I wasn’t asleep! I know what I saw.” Which is from the part where Bertha tears up her veil in the middle of the night. But it wasn’t in the movie, and that’s probably the only thing I “dislike” about it.

Okay, okay, maybe I’ll add *one* more thing to my list of “they-needed-to-add-this-for-it-to-be-perfect” and that’s the discovery that Jane is cousin to St. John, Mary, and Hannah. I reeeeeaalllyyyy wanted this in there so bad. Jane is going through all this emotional turmoil, she’s just left Thornfield, and as a reader your heart just aches with her. But then there was that point where she discovers she’s related to St. John and Hannah and Mary, and it’s this Jane you haven’t really seen before. She’s overflowing, she’s full of joy, she’s in this blissful happiness. And I so rejoiced at that section of the book because it was like a little light in the dark part – and I would have liked to see that in the movie.

I wasn’t pleased with who played young Jane. Her lips. Didn’t. Work. Just had to get that out. =P Her eyes looked a lot like Mia’s, and maybe that’s why they cast her. But her overall complexion wasn’t “Jane” enough for me. I imagined young Jane to be softer, quieter, and plainer on the outside – with that fiery passion on the inside that only came out when provoked. Because it seems that’s the way she was in the book more.

It’s rated PG-13 for the nude picture in the hall, which, honestly, I don’t understand why they needed it in the first place, because it absolutely did not add to the story at all, that I could tell.

The character building and conversations between Jane and Mr. Rochester were fantastic – and just how I pictured them in the book. Excellently, beautifully done.

A;sdklfja;djf I can’t get over how amazing Jane was. Her character arc was so well done, and she was played really, really well. So was Mr. Rochester.

Time-wise, it was 133 minutes, and it could have been 30 minutes more and I wouldn’t have minded. Prince Caspian, after all, was like 2.5 hours – and the book is like a quarter the size of Jane Eyre. :P The story moved very, very, very quickly, and it could have slowed down in a few parts to let things sink in. I would have liked more of the party at Thornfield, interaction with Miss Ingram, Jane & Mr. Rochester, etc.

Speaking of Miss Ingram. While I didn’t like who played her (she wasn’t very pretty, in my opinion, and in the book she’s like the epitome of beauty) I can understand why they chose to make her look uglier (she was still pretty, mind you) – but basically because they didn’t have enough time to build her character, so they had to use her outward appearance to build it, and I was okay with that.

The guy who played St. John was AWESOME. I really liked him.

Sets, costumes, it was all amazing. The guy who played Mason was pretty good. I never had a very clear picture of him in my head to begin with, so it didn’t bother me.

OH. There was one thing that bothered me in Mia’s performance of Jane – and that is when she’s at Mrs. Reed’s bedside and says “you are forgiven,” or whatever that line was. She said it with a lot of bitterness and hatred, which is absolutely not the way Jane said it in the book. It didn’t seem in the movie like she had really forgiven her.

One of my friends was saying that the biblical themes – Jane’s Christian upbringing and how importantly that played out in her life – wasn’t there. And while I agree that it wasn’t prominent, I found it very subtly portrayed in her character even though she didn’t say anything. That could be just because I’ve read the book, but I also think Mia was really well-studied in Jane’s character - it was portrayed in the way Mia played Jane. She knew those Christian values, even though the words weren't in the script.

On the whole, this movie was absolutely amazing. However, it does not work without the book. I am so glad I read the book before I watched the movie, because it made it so much more intriguing. It’s impossible for filmmakers to develop such depth of characters as there are in the book – in such a short time. But when you have such brilliant people acting it as were in the this film, you get that depth of character if you’ve read the book because you feel it in the portrayal of their character even though it’s not a very long movie.

I absolutely recommend seeing this movie – but ONLY if you’ve read the book first. I say this to anyone who tries to see Narnia without reading the books. The books have been, are, and always will be better than any film adaptation. And the films are so much more beautiful when you’ve read the book.

Especially when it's done so well as this. With Dawn Treader, I saw character depth because I knew what I wanted to see. But with Jane Eyre I saw that not only did I know what I wanted to see, but that the actors knew it too.

Okay, now it’s time for my quick Narnia-geek-out-moment.

1) Georgie Henley (who plays Lucy in the Narnia films) plays young Jane in an earlier adaptation of Jane Eyre. (You know I can connect Narnia to *everything.*;) And I just have to say: GEORGIE HENLEY IS NOT JANE EYRE. Her complexion, her face, her eyes, her whole being is just far too loved, cheerful, positive, and delightful to be Jane. Perhaps it’s because I know here as Lucy, but….man. She’s just not Jane. It could be the freckles. She does a fine job portraying sadness and grief – which I thought was wonderful at the part when Helen died. But she doesn't have character depth and she. Is. Not. Jane. :P

2) Let’s compare. With Prince Caspian, they said “let’s make a modern-ish, worldly sequel to the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe – and oh, look, there are lines from the book we can throw in there and call it Narnia.” With Dawn Treader, they said “let’s adapt this book into a movie – and oh, we’ll add this and this and this and this and this and this because it needs it and we’re not going to do any of that.”

See the difference? Prince Caspian was a movie with Narnia thrown in, Dawn Treader was Narnia with disastrous plot twists thrown in.

Jane Eyre was neither. It was like the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. “let’s adapt this book into film.”And they did it right.

::happy sigh::

Comment and tell me what you think, thought, or if you've read the book, or ANYTHING. (:

More pictures because I didn't want the top of the post to be crowded.... (:

Okay, done geeking out.

Jedithz don't lithsp.

Today is May 4th!

Which is supposedly Star Wars Day.

"May the 4th be with you."

Ahahahahahaha I'm so funny.

Actually, whoever thought of that was pretty genius, if I do say so myself.

Happy Star Wars Day. If I was obsessed I'd geek out with a nice long post, but I'm not. (I can see you rejoicing about that one.) But I thought you might be as amused as I was. They need to have a Narnia Day.