No one believes me when I tell them I’ve been to Mars.¹

It happened during the summer of 1977, just after I graduated from the fifth grade.

My father had taken a job as the project manager for a massive building project in downtown Tulsa. Dad didn’t want to spend the whole summer separated from his family, so he bought an 18-foot Coleman camper and told us to pack what we needed for a summer in Oklahoma.

To me this meant a baseball glove and a stack of books. Just before leaving town I fortuitously discovered A Princess of Mars in a friend’s basement library and was sent off on my journey with a grocery bag full of old pulp novels.

We landed at a KOA outside the city limits, beyond even the suburbs, a quarter mile from the highway. The place felt like Mars to me: brutally hot days and cool, breezy nights; a barren landscape of sharp-edged rocks and fine dust that swirled underfoot and clung to everything; a sea of red stretching to the horizon. From the porthole window of my narrow top bunk above the tool chest and spare tire, I could see the rim of a dry canal bending into the distance.

Fortunately, our environmental shelter came equipped with air-conditioning and a built-in reading light, making the transition from Earth to Barsoom ridiculously easy. For eleven weeks I whiled away the hours absorbed in books written by a man who had taken so many readers to Mars that eventually a crater was named after him.

Edgar Rice Burroughs is best known as the creator of Tarzan of the Apes, but his John Carter of Mars series was far more intriguing to me than his jungle hero.

Since that miraculous summer I have reread A Princess of Mars several times, always hoping to recapture a little of the magic. I am always disappointed. The book simply wasn’t written for a twenty-first-century adult.

But it’s not just Edgar Rice Burroughs who disappoints. Few of the stories that engaged me as a child hold my interest now. I am too cynical, too fat with stories, too old for the common wonder of childhood.

I wish I could reenter the fantastical places I slipped into so easily when I was younger. I wish I could go to Mars again. But growing up has consequences.

As the brain develops, we find different things appealing. The desire for wonder is supplanted by a drive for romance and sex, for human drama, and for insight into the nature of things. Life experience begins to hammer home the painful differences between fantasy and reality. In short, the kinds of stories we crave become more logical, more informative, more true to life.

This, as I said, is disappointing. I want to believe in the green men of Mars and their tusky cavalries. I want to ride a sky ship and bound across the Martian soil with a six-legged dog. I want to be insanely good with a saber in spite of the fact I’ve never actually taken lessons or even held one.

But I am old enough now to have learned that life isn’t like that.

Which could lead me to the tempting conclusion that life is an existential letdown. The future was supposed to be better than this. More awe-inspiring. More evolved. I was promised a jetpack and regular vacations to the moon. Instead, life handed me a second mortgage and a spontaneous allergy to gluten.

Is it, then, all a trick? Are fairy tales just the soft lies we tell children to protect them from truths they are not yet prepared to face? Was the innocence of childhood nothing more than a happy dream?

This book is my attempt to answer that question fairly and with great hope.

I hope to demonstrate that all stories—even the dreamy fantasies of childhood—point to something bigger than entertainment or even survival, and that, properly understood, the language of story is the language of Scripture.

To demonstrate the latter, I lean heavily on three techniques that may not be familiar to readers. Indeed, the first of these is defamiliarization, particularly the defamiliarization of the Bible. As long as we come to its text thinking we already know what’s there, we’re unlikely to see anything new or inspiring or revelatory. And there is always something life-changing in it, provided we’re willing to be challenged. The difficulty lies in the fact that our Bible cups are already filled. We know the stories of the forbidden fruit, of the Red Sea parting, of baby Jesus asleep in a manger. To really appreciate these and other narratives in Scripture, we must learn to turn them over, see them from a fresh angle, and shake them free of their familiar wrappings. To be filled, our cups must first be emptied.

Art, after all, is a way of revealing the hidden things we dismiss or take for granted in reality. Great art hides its most profound revelations in ways that provoke curiosity and compel us to look closer. In other words, it uses an abductive process, the second technique explored in this book. Abductive storytelling is outlined more thoroughly in chapter 2.

Finally, I rely on a simple and repeated invitation to place yourself in the stories of the Bible. Not as its protagonist, but as someone whose life has been interrupted by a startling breaking-in of God’s kingdom: a good man whose quiet life is targeted by demonic forces; a prophet whose life and identity are turned upside-down; a blind man whose sight is restored.

Stories are important because they demonstrate that ultimate meaning exists. Not only does it exist, but it is sometimes wondrous, often horrifying, and occasionally funny.

This book was written for everyone who has been to Mars or Narnia or Middle-earth and discovered you were more at home there than you are here.

This book was written for everyone who longs for home.

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