My dear children, you come from God and belong to God. You have already won a big victory over those false teachers, for the Spirit in you is far stronger than anything in the world. These people belong to the Christ-denying world. They talk the world’s language and the world eats it up. But we come from God and belong to God. Anyone who knows God understands us and listens. 1 John 4:4-5 (The Message)
(Spoiler alert: If you have not yet read The Hunger Games and intend to, you might not want to read this post)
I still vividly remember a nightmare I had when I was a little girl. In my dream, our family was staying at a motel. There was a walkway and parking spaces for cars in front of the rooms. My sister, who is younger than me, went outside to the parking lot despite our parents warning to stay in the room. A witch found her and took her away. Perhaps I remember the dream so clearly because when my dad came to see why I was crying in my room, he gave me this advice. Whenever you wake with a bad dream, think up a better ending. A happy ending. One where the good guy wins, not the witch. So, I rescued my sister, and we lived happily ever after. I like a happy ending. In books and in movies. While I look for well written stories with vivid descriptions, I prefer the ones where the hero gets his girl and the girl gets her hero. There can be moments of trouble, difficulties and worries, but in the end, the story needs to end happily for me to be satisfied. When you transfer a story into the big screen, even the little screen of television, I become a player in the story and then, unless I want to lie awake all night reconfiguring the ending, it better turn out happy. This weekend, in an effort to try and rest hoping to get over this congestion that continues to plague me, I read The Hunger Games trilogy. I should have known it was not my kind of book, but I wanted to see for myself what all the hoopla was about. The books left me feeling depressed and sad and no matter how hard I try, I cannot come up with a happy ending. Because there is no happy ending. Unlike the Harry Potter series to which Hunger Games is being compared, there is too much reality in the Hunger Games. In Harry Potter, there are monsters and evil, death and destruction, but, the whole time you are reading Harry Potter, you know it is all fantasy. In the world of The Hunger Games, there is too much truth to deny that it is only fiction. Humans are the monsters, killing each other for sport or out of greed, sacrificing their neighbors or their children for a better place in life. Having just come from a country where children are regularly sold in order to put food on the table, I did not find The Hunger Games to be so far from reality. The “games,” the war, the politics could easily happen, in fact, do happen in every city, state and country in the world. Maybe we do not put children in the direct line of fire, but we endanger them in so many other ways. They are expendable. Despite featuring a strong female heroine through all three of the books, in the end, Katniss is broken and will never recover. All the things that we think might make her happy, a husband, a home, children, do not because what she saw, what she did in an effort to survive, cannot be undone. In the epilogue, fifteen years after the story ends, she admits to still having nightmares. Because in the real world, there are not always happy endings. No matter how hard I try to imagine one. Except in the Bible. At least there, the hero still wins and the monster is defeated. And that, I don’t have to make up.
I've just started MOCKINGJAY. I knew at the start of the series that there would be no happy ending. How can there be when such barbarism is condoned… encouraged, even? I take the whole story as a warning – we are not so far away from this reality that it cannot come to pass unless we take steps to ensure that our world doesn't become like this. It starts with us. You are doing your bit to make the world a BETTER place. I'm doing what I can too. With enough of us, we can rewrite our own ending and rest easy in the knowledge that God has the perfect ending already written.