By Jim Vitale

I love fantasy stories. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia and Space Trilogy, anything by George MacDonald, L’Engle’s Time Quintet, Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga, LeGuin’s Earthsea Cycle, Rowling’s Harry Potter series…I could list a dozen more stories about fantastic places and the fairy-creatures, knights, and epic stories that live there. I can’t get enough, and these stories take up much of my reading time.

For many people such fairy tales are good for one of three things: children’s bedtime stories, escapism, and/or entertainment (sometimes all three at once!). These stories are viewed as mere children’s tales, something we all eventually grow out of. They are viewed as mere entertainment, something just to pass the time. They are viewed as escapism, at best a distraction from the real world and at worst an ignoring of it. While it is true that these fairy stories are good for children, do entertain us, and transport us to worlds beyond our own, there is another function of fairy tales that few often appreciate: truth.

Fairy tales, although fiction, often have a way of telling us the truth far better than any nonfiction book ever could. For one thing, we are creatures of story. God created us to prefer stories over plain information. Anything packaged as a story is going to appeal to us far more than plain facts.

But there’s another reason. Fiction stories cause us to let our guard down. Fairy tales provide a palatable packaging for otherwise difficult topics. Especially topics of faith and God. C.S. Lewis talks about the value of fairy tales for people of all ages. He argues that people’s piety and preconceptions bog down their understanding of their relationship with God. Sometimes, he argues, you need to set aside the Bible and present the truths of the faith in a whole new way in order to reach people. He says, “But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.”

Steal past the watchful dragons. I love that phrase.

We all have watchful dragons, parts of our mind that refuse to believe the unbelievable. They are rational lizards, breathing fire at anything that smacks of magic or faith. These winged reptiles would have us believe only what we can see, touch, taste, hear, or smell. They are skeptical of anything that requires faith, belief without proof.

Dragons are notoriously hard to trick, but a fairy tale will do it. Accepting the genre as inherently fantastical or fictitious, they will hardly notice when a word of truth slips by. And so someone otherwise uninterested in hearing the gospel can read the Chronicles of Narnia, encounter the lion Aslan, and hear the story of Jesus without even realize it’s happening. Magic.

But what does all this have to do with camp?

I think camp functions exactly like a fairy tale. People go to church and expect church-y things. The weekly routine of it awakens their watchful dragons who set up a blazing protective wall. We go to church and we wave the gospel away like an annoying fly. Rare is the sermon that steals past our dragons to our heart. But when you come to camp, you let your guard down. Our 400 acres of woods and wildlife, the smoke of a campfire, the glow of the stars—all of these things are like a fairy tale. At camp, the status quo is upset. The typical, run-of-the-mill church experiences are set aside. What happens at camp is often new, unexpected, outside of the routine. This unsettling of the equilibrium has a power to it. The same sermon you heard in the pew last Sunday could take on a whole new power around the campfire. That hymn you just can’t stand whispers a new truth to you beside the lake. The grace and mercy of communion strikes at your heart when it happens under the stars.

Camp steals past the watchful dragons of your mind and touches you at your heart and soul. Magic.

But don’t take my word for it. Come to camp for a retreat or a walk in the woods. See what time on these 400 acres can do for your soul…and your dragons!