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It has been almost two whole years, but you and your Weta-geek friends are finally back in action, standing in line before Christmas for yet another long-awaited midnight movie premiere. In front of you is a Lord of the Rings junkie who looks about this close to flunking out of grad school, and behind you is a pip-squeak of a third grader whose dad looks about this close to dragging him back home:

"I thought this was The Polar Express."

"Nope. That was last year, Dad."

"So what is it?"

"Duh! It's Narnia. Sheesh."

"Narnia. What's that? Sounds Elvish or something. Wait-is this one of those Lord of the Flies movies?"

"Lord of the Rings."

"Right. Anyway, what's it rated? If it's got all those crazy creatures and battle scenes and stuff, we're going home."

Meanwhile, the Lord of the Rings junkie in front of you is muttering into his cell phone: "Dude, take the left aisle, row fifteen from the back. I'll be there as quick as I can. No, I'm in line; I somehow got stuck in Barneyland. Seriously, the little kid behind me is, like, two years old. He'll be crying like a baby when they open the doors. Don't his parents have a clue?"

Clearly not, you realize, after a few more minutes of eavesdropping. You and your Weta-geek friends exchange smug looks. You almost feel sorry for the dad. Because the minute those doors open, the battle for Middle-earth has nothing on the theater lobby, and Pip-squeak had better make a run for the car.

Yep, the New Zealand crew who created the big-screen Lord of the Rings trilogy is back for another blockbuster, but this time with C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. If all goes well, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe will be only the first in a series, and from now on we won't go for more than a few years at a time without the magic of the wizards at Weta Workshop taking the New Zealand landscape by storm and our breath away. After three solid years of The Lord of the Rings hype, we're looking for a little excitement again, a bit of fantasy magic to make our lives feel like the adventure we wish they could be.

Sigh. If only life were more on the scale of Orlando Bloom taking down the giant Oliphaunt in The Return of the King rather than the usual, tedious mall-crawl with the Abercrombie crowd! We often wish the daily grind held a greater resemblance to all those fantasy worlds we've come to love, don't we? In our more desperate moments, we're tempted to walk smack into pillars at subway stations, just to see if we end up at platform nine and three-quarters. And which of us, at some point in our not-so-distant childhood (yes, let's be honest!), hasn't pushed aside the coats in a closet, hoping to find an entrance to another world?

The disappointing fact that most closets lead only to drywall doesn't eliminate our thirst for fantasylands: places where mystery, adventure, romance, and dangerous quests are the order of the day. Even while yawning in class or surfing the Net, we hunger for other worlds. We long to go beyond the streets we know, beyond our familiar woods and fields, and into the land of Faerie; to Middle-earth, Narnia, or Summerland; to the kingdom east of the sun and west of the moon.

This longing isn't incidental. It's something we're born with. Most of us, if we're honest, sense with unease that this world is not all there is. At times we get inner hints and glimpses of something beyond what the eye can see. Eventually we begin to suspect that there is another Kingdom out there, perhaps closer than we realize, possibly even just through that door.

The Kingdom of God. We see the phrase sprinkled throughout the pages of the New Testament, especially in the Gospels (the first four books). People sing about it in church. We hear it from the lips of Christians. But do we really know what it is? Where is it, exactly? Can we set out on a journey to find it? What sorts of roads do we take to get there? How do we know when we've found it?

It's a topic Jesus was especially keen on. "How can I describe the Kingdom of God?" he asked the crowds gathered to hear him speak. "What story should I use to illustrate it?" (Mark 4:30). He used mysterious parables to spark their curiosity: The Kingdom is like a farmer; it's like a treasure hunt, like a woman working yeast into some dough. It's like a fishing net, a mustard seed, a pearl of great price found at a market stall. In other words, the Kingdom is not a political coup, as Jesus' listeners were hoping. It's not even a physical place at all-at least, not yet. It's been here all the time, waiting to be found in the midst of everyday life, as close as your heartbeat. Jesus said, "The Kingdom of God is already among you" (Luke 17:21).

What? You mean, the Kingdom isn't some magical place you can only reach if you know the right incantations or open the right closet doors? You mean it's not some airy-fairy heavenly realm in the clouds? Nope. Instead, wherever God is acknowledged as Lord and King, that's the Kingdom. Our universe itself was originally the perfect Kingdom, ruled by the Creator who made it, but we humans on planet Earth have been in rebellion against the true King since the beginning of time. Then just when things were looking really hopeless, God sent his Prince, Jesus, into rebel territory to conquer evil and free us to be true citizens of the Kingdom again. We can choose to be his subjects or not-with just consequences either way. That's the essential story we find in the Bible, and it's the essential story at the heart of each of our lives.

And that's what all good fantasy stories have at their core, whether or not it's a conscious theme. J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, made this case convincingly to his friend and colleague C.S. Lewis, years after Lewis's life-altering reading of Phantastes. All fairy tales, Tolkien argued, echo the gospel of Jesus Christ in some way because the gospel is the True Story; it's the real fairy tale that crashed into the time line of history. And eventually Lewis accepted Tolkien's reasoning. "The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact," Lewis wrote. The Kingdom we all long for, beyond the world we know, is real after all. This idea became a major theme in Lewis's writings from that point on, including-and perhaps most especially-in the land of Narnia.

It's as if God was whispering into Lewis's imagination: "How can I describe the Kingdom of God? What story should I use to illustrate it?" Even as the images of a faun in a snowy wood and a queen on her wintry sledge came unbidden to Lewis's mind, Aslan came "bounding" into the story as the true king of that fallen, imaginary realm. And the rest of us are drawn into a tale of high adventure where the stakes are nothing less than the rescue of a rebel for the salvation of an entire land, and the outcome is nothing greater than the crowning of the Sons and Daughters of Adam and Eve.

Someday, the Bible promises, Jesus the King will return to this physical earth, and our fallen, sinful world will be conquered once and for all: "The world has now become the Kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign forever and ever" (Revelation 11:15). We'll reign beside him as kings and queens (Luke 22:29-30). We'll finally have the spiritual eyes to see what's been there all along.

Meanwhile, as Christians, we walk this journey of faith with one foot in the Kingdom and one in this world-the ordinary, humdrum, painful, and even frightening planet we've been given as our home. The careful dance we do is that of trying to live our waking hours in this fallen place without forgetting that God's realm is our true home in the end. Our attitudes, dreams, beliefs, values, behaviors, and words are to be shaped by those of our Lord, not by those of this rebellious world. We are to live like true Narnians, so to speak, in the here and now.

And that's what we're truly longing for. On those weekends when we're suddenly gripped with the urge to watch all three extended editions of The Lord of the Rings, what we really want, deep down inside (besides therapy), is the assurance that there is a realm someplace where evil has been conquered once and for all. And when we hear the voice of Aslan booming through the surround sound of the darkened theater and our hearts feel a stab of joy, what we really yearn for is the voice of our true King and Savior saying, "Well done!" (Luke 19:17). We want to live like citizens of his country, even in the midst of our daily lives.

And we can.

Sarah Arthur is the author of Walking with Frodo, Walking with Bilbo, as well as Walking Through The Wardrobe: A devotional quest into The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (Thirsty). Visit her website at www.saraharthur.com. This article is adapted from Walking Through the Wardrobe and is used with permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. For other thirsty[?] books, check out www.areuthirsty.com.

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Walking through the wardrobe By Sarah Arthur

Walking through the wardrobe
By Sarah Arthur