Tales And Their Real Endings

I found this great piece on fairy tales and their not so happy endings. In fact, I found it sometime in December and it got me to thinking about some of the "fairy tale" type stuff we put into or leave out of the Christmas story. This thought mainly comes from when Herod kills off all the little boys two years and younger to try and ride himself of this rival who is to be King of kings and Lord of Lords. We don't get that event told to us very often when dive into the events surrounding the birth of Jesus.

But that got me to thinking back even more. We tend not to tell most of the real rough details surrounding a number of biblical events. Noah's ark: genocide. We tend to like animals too much to spoil that story. Abraham, Issac, and Jacob: serious family dysfunction. They led Israel out of Egypt so we cut them some slack. David: lust, lying and murder. Who doesn't like to camp out on a good David and Goliath story?

So what makes us by-pass the not-so-fairy-tale parts of these and other biblical narratives? Is that we think they cast God in a bad light? Is that we think that people far away from God will be repelled by those parts? Are we scared to share them because we are uncomfortable with the tension they create in our own lives about who God is and what He allows to take place in His story?

Who knows? But it sure got me thinking again about God, the way He works, what He reveals about Himself through these ugly events, and how this reflects in my own relationship with Jesus. How about you?