Invisible Children and their connections to Hollywood and the music scene continue to amaze me. One band in particular, Fall Out Boy, has been so moved and excited by IC's work that they scraped a studio-produced music video and went to Northern Uganda to film a new video themselves over a week in July. It was entirely shot on location in Gulu Township with kids and parents from a local IC-sponsored school... and released to wide acclaim on Friday.
As the elder tells the story: "We have to do better... if not for us, for our children."
One of my childhood heroes has passed into light. Madeline L'Engle was author of over sixty books including the Newbery award-winning children's book, "A Wrinkle In Time," and so I thought it fitting to share a bit.
Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith. Faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.
Madeleine L'Engle told her stories through the lens of darkness and light; the struggles of life transformed by love. Her books afford me an escape and retreat unlike any other... where the champion fumbles along, beset by the evil within, and yet is surrounded by seraphs and starlight of such profound beauty and starts to understand and live in wild, glorious truth. And then I step out of her books and return to my own adventure and battlefield, better equipped to fumble along myself.
Read any daily paper: you've got to survive, you've got to walk through the dark to get to the light. It isn't free. It takes courage to walk through the dark.
Alongside the ranks of Richard Bach, C.S. Lewis, and Susan Cooper, L'Engle's Time Series is one of the most influential writings in my life. The simple, cheerful, and warm moments of a family paired with massively, soberingly, and cosmically significant missions. At once a part of a time that stands still and all that is timeless and eternal. And yet, Madeline L'Engle challenges me to walk further: "The deepest communion with God is beyond words, on the other side of silence."
