I grew up thinking that the world was full of buried treasure—that just about every town had its own secret shipwreck story or a hidden cache of gold somewhere up in the mountains just beyond the city limits. It was not so much because I’d read too many Hardy Boy mysteries or watched too much Treasure Island and the Goonies, but because, growing up in the mountains of Oregon, there were more local legends of buried treasure, lost mines, and sunken treasure-ships than a kid could ever hope to keep straight. I mean, even Oregon’s own Crater Lake National Park features a famous, real-life search for lost gold within its origins story. Having heard my fair share of local treasure-hunt stories featuring coded maps and cryptic clues, it was only natural to assume that I might encounter something of the sort in real life.
That was back in the 1980s, when REM was a popular band and “Stand” was just another one of their hits. Or was it? To a kid who grew up hearing about puzzling markers in the woods and maps that lead to treasure, the lyrics to that odd song sounded like exactly what I heard them to be: clues. I mean, really, couldn’t that line about “If bushes were trees, the trees would be falling” be meant to guide some special treasure hunter to a particular location somewhere in the world where bushes might be falling if they were trees? And, let me remind you, this was the ‘80s. Conspiracy theories about secrets hidden in song lyrics—or on album covers—were as common then as shadow governments and alien bases on the moon are today.
I’m sure it sounds silly to others that I thought such things, and of course, there never was any treasure found by following that song. It was all my own false assumptions. But the idea—the embarrassing memory of my friends reacting to my absurd theory—still reminds me of how easy it is for people to be led astray by false assumptions about what they expect something to be.
…Take the Bible, for example.
I recently heard a statistic from a theology professor that 85% of the Bible is about the salvation story. That leaves 15% for all the other stuff people might think can be found between Genesis and Revelation. Really? Eighty-five percent? How is that so? Does everybody out there agree with that statistic? Certainly I don’t.
When I read the Bible, the passages that deal with “salvation” seem, at least to me, to be few and far between. Even reading through the Gospels, there is just so much more that Jesus taught than merely answering the age-old question of “What must I do to be saved?” Could it be that the 85% is more a reflection of what those theologians are looking for within the Bible than it is an accurate measurement of the Bible’s contents?
Of course, my own findings could be just as much a reflection of my own expectations. You see, I was born into a home with a fear of hell so strong I prayed the sinner’s prayer every morning on the way to school…just in case I didn’t live to say it again at my nightly prayer-time. I went to Sunday School on Sundays and a Christian elementary school five days every week. I knew those Bible stories inside and out…or so I thought. My childhood was not fore-ordained to be one of cloistered body or mind, and by the time I had matured into a young man, a lot of what I had learned from my Christian upbringing just plain didn’t make sense anymore.
At this point in my life, I could have done what a lot of people do and just walked away from Christianity. I didn’t have that option, though. I had experienced enough of the spiritual world to know that there was something real, something true, in the teachings of Jesus. But what the mainstream Christian industry was selling me was not it. Not by a long shot.
I know a lot of people who let other people tell them what is in the Bible. It makes sense, I suppose, to let the pastors, the best-selling authors, the musicians on the radio and the smart-looking men on television tell us what the Bible says and what it means. But one day, I opened the Bible to read it and something amazing happened: it spoke to me. It told me something that I had never heard before. Something no other theologian had ever told me was in there. This experience was followed up by others—other moments where the scriptures literally “spoke” to me. Suddenly I was in a whole new world. Not the world where I’d show up at church on Sunday and let the Pastor give me “God’s message” for the week. Suddenly God was speaking directly to me. And it was changing my life.
How, then, to convey this life-changing phenomenon to others? Here I was, filled with passion and energy and joy, wanting to pass it on to others, but not knowing how? At the same time, I was confronted with mainstream (or at least denominationally mainstream) theological beliefs that I did not agree with. How could I address these disagreements without sounding like just another fanatic who was convinced that his own way was “right” and everybody else was wrong?
One day, walking home from work, I stumbled across a solution. The illustration of the Bible and the map began to form in my mind, and thus I discovered the beginning and theme for my first Tales of Vantoria adventure, the Sarian’s Sword.
What would you do if you found an old map? More to the point: what would you expect? Where would you expect the map to lead you? What would you expect to find at the end of your search? And what would you do if you discovered, after all the time you spent searching, that the map had all along meant to lead you to something completely, wonderfully different than what you had expected?
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