Dragons Can Be Beaten

"Fairy tales are more than true – not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten" - Neil Gaiman paraphrasing GK Chesterton. One of my favorite stories of beating a dragon is The Hobbit. After many adventures the Hobbit and his dwarf companions reach the secret door in the Lonely Mountain and Bilbo must head into the dragon's lair alone. There is a point as Bilbo heads down the long dark tunnel that he stops. "It was at this point that Bilbo stopped. Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterwards were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait." It is perhaps because I have an incredibly vivid and overactive imagination but I have found in my life that battling through my fear of something is far worse than the actual thing itself. My very first time being a patient in a hospital was when I was 29 years old and had to have my appendix removed. My imagination of how much an IV would hurt, or what going into an MRI machine would be like, or dealing with stitches would be like all turned out to be way worse than the actual experiences. When the battle is taking place inside your head, the dragons can be very real. But just as Bilbo and St George and even Harry Potter defeated their dragons, we know that we can defeat ours. For some of us, our minds are a lot scarier than anything out in the real world, but as with all of our battles, whether inside our head or out, we can always turn to the Lord and He will open our eyes and show us that those that are with us are far greater than those that are against us, and that He has not given us the Spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound and whole and healed mind.