A person can live 40 days without food, 3 days without water, 5 minutes without air . . .
. . . but not one second without hope.
Is there hope in hard times? Why is hope important to you? Where do you find your hope?
Watch our Truth in Two to find out why hope is essential for all people (full text below).
We Christians find hope in words and The Word (John 1:1-18).
Find out more about becoming a Christian APOLOGIST. I would be glad to talk with you about the work of RATIO CHRISTI (here). Subscribe to “Truth in Two” videos from Comenius (here). Mark is President of The Comenius Institute (website). Dr. Eckel spends time with Christian young people in public university (1 minute video), hosts a weekly radio program with diverse groups of guests (1 minute video), and interprets culture from a Christian vantage point (1 minute video). Consider becoming a Comenius patron (here).
Picture Credit: Luke Renoe, Snappy Goat, Scop.io
FULL TEXT
Books were forbidden. Even the possession of a book meant death. But every night a group of girls would gather, secretly reading Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Helen and her friends lived in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. Under the pretense of sewing, a couple dozen young Jewish women would come together to read and study. Were Nazi soldiers to have found out what Helen and her friends were doing, they would have been shot.
Each evening, while the other girls did math problems, Helen would – from memory – recount a chapter from the famous American southern novel Gone with the Wind. Neil Gaiman, world famous fiction writer, asked his cousin Helen, who lived through the experience, why she would risk death for a story. Helen responded, “Because for an hour every day, those girls were not in the Warsaw ghetto – they were in the American South. They had adventures; they got away.”
Eliot Peper, himself an accomplished novelist, retold this story in Medium. You can find the link to his reminiscence following this Truth in Two. Peper summarized stories as “space-time machines” where we can “visit the ancient past or the far future, and peek inside other people’s minds.”
“The magic of escapist fiction,” Peper quotes Gaiman, “Is that it can actually help you escape from a bad place and the story, in the process, can give you tools you can take back into your life to help make it better.”
At the Comenius Institute we agree: going through bad times is sometimes the best time to read novels. As Christians we believe words have power to overcome any oppressor. Whether we are escaping the tyranny of a Nazi regime or the brutality of a virus, reading books can give us hope.
For Truth in Two, this is Dr. Mark Eckel, President of the Comenius Institute, personally seeking truth wherever it’s found.
https://medium.com/s/greatescape/how-stories-help-us-escape-491f24b233c8