Dear Peter Pan,
Are you having fun yet? It sure looked that way to me back when we first crossed paths. My mom took me to the movies, and there we met. I was like you, though not quite so daring and dashing. I was young, and pleased to be that way. My favorite thing to play was pirates. My little friends and I would treat our little barn as a great ship. We would don our eye patches and cutlasses. We would peer through our spyglasses, and we would arrrrrgue about who got to be the captain.
It was a delightful boyhood. One time the bigger kids in the area blessed us little by burying treasure for us, and providing us with a map. The treasure chest was a paper sack, the treasure itself a veritable trove of penny candy.
I don’t, I hope you see, begrudge children their childhood. I do not look at all upon my own youth as wasted. It is a delightful time chock full of blessings from the hand of God. It creates memories that we will carry with us into eternity. It even has its own set of virtues that are hard to hold on to as we age- wonder and trust, and peace. Our Lord enjoins us to hold onto these virtues as we age, that we would have faith as children.
I am writing, however, not to agree with, but to challenge you, to invite you into the deep end of the pool. The water is just fine. You are wise to rejoice in your youth, and a fool for wanting to never leave. I recognize both of these, because I’ve been there. When there is no Never Never Land on which one could land, when age comes inevitably, we make your mistake by flying to the island of Nostalgia. We pine for what we have lost. We take our minds to a magical land where we are young again, remembering only the good, the bad buried within the belly of the alligator time.
The trouble is, whether we are in the land of Nostalgia, or if we are in Never Never Land, in both cases we never land at home. We were made to be men. We were made to lead not other boys, but women. To put it bluntly, what you are missing is Wendy. And one step beyond that, you are missing boys that would be yours, that you would not merely lead, but raise. It is not enough that you should be a hero in battling Hook. It is far better that you should lead a woman, that you should defeat your foe, and that you should raise your children to defeat the children of your foes.
This comes to you if you would but accept the call to grow up- you will be allowed to live bigger than yourself. You will multiply your life far beyond what you will have by merely extending your childhood. Stay young as long as you like, but eventually, one way or another, you will face what comes to all men, and all boys- death. If you would live forever, you will have to live not as a boy, but as a man, and through the lives of others. Peter, let me encourage you to put aside all the effort you expend to be a boy, and invite you again to be a man, and so to live forever.
To embrace adulthood isn’t, however, merely to embrace the future, but is to embrace the past. When I, for instance, take on the man’s job of standing in the pulpit to deliver the Word of God, I am not there alone. Now I am no longer the boy of my father, but the man my father has raised. Perhaps better still, I am a man in a long line of men. I get to be in the family portrait. I stand there with both my father, and my fathers.
You may have heard of the Reformation. There men, not boys, stood not just with their earthly fathers, but with their heavenly Father. They did real work, and were real heroes, something a boy can never be. One of those, John Knox, was forced to flee his native Scotland, as Bloody Mary was breathing down his neck. He escaped to Geneva where he learned from and worked with John Calvin. When conditions allowed for his return, Knox went home to his native Scotland. There he was reported to have cried, as the gospel spread across the globe, “Give me Scotland, or I die.”
That he might secure Scotland, that the light of the gospel might spread across that land, and outlast Knox, he set about establishing the church of Jesus Christ. He prepared other men, not boys, for the gospel ministry. And the first man he ordained there was my ancestor, Robert Campbell Sproul. As a man, and as a minister of that same gospel, I get to share in that calling, in that suffering, in that opportunity to be a hero.
You have fame. Decades after your story was first told, children still read your story. Children still line up to watch your story on the silver screen. But, and pardon me for my frankness, yours is a story of a boy winning a boy’s battle. You are bold and exciting, but you are, if only because you are a boy, less than a hero. Leave the land of Never Never, or you will never live forever. Leave the land of Never Never, or you will forever be a boy, exciting perhaps, but less than significant.
You have been a boy long enough. The time has come to be a man. The time has come to enter into the very purpose of your existence. The time has come to enter into your life in its fullness. Be a man.
In the King’s Service,
R.C. Sproul Jr.
