Sleeping Beauty - Struggles Through Mortality

After Maleficent finishes her monologue and leaves Prince Philip alone in his cell, the three good fairies  come in to bust him out, but before they all left the cell, Mistress Flora armed Prince Philip with an enchanted shield of virtue and a mighty sword of truth, which I felt was somewhat unnecessary after noticing one of the items in the background.

Also in Prince Philip's cell, perhaps to make it obvious that an eventual release wasn't in Maleficent's plans, there was a large, stained, wooden block with a black ax embedded in it. If I were escaping this dungeon, the first thing I would do would be to grab the ax. And if I had magical help, which the prince did, I might have asked them to turn the wooden block into a wooden shield.

On the other hand, a sword is more practical and versatile than an ax, and, being a prince, Philip probably had received training on how to use a sword, while he may not have received such training to ax-wielding. Besides, the ax was all black and probably cursed. The sword was shiny and silver and was probably blessed. And the shield of virtue was both lighter and stronger than a wooden shield would have been, and we've been specifically told that it's enchanted.

So, what was the point of explaining all that? To illustrate the point that God's ways are better than our ways, and His plan is better than anything we alone could come up with. He knows of possibilities we couldn't possibly imagine. I wouldn't look to the three good fairies, whose magic "can only to good... to bring joy and happiness" (quoting Fauna, after the bonfire), to provide me with magical weapons, but that's exactly what happened. We can try to get through life our way, using our own ideas of what's good and best, or we can trust God, knowing that his plan will work out best.

***

Armed with his new weapons of righteousness, Prince Philip and the three fairies get out of the cell, but are immediately spotted by that nasty crow. (Or raven. Whatever.) The crow flies off, cawing its head off, and quickly returns with an army of goblins. Prince Philip runs from the goblins at first, then gets cornered and holds them off long enough to find another way to escape. He jumps out a window, slides down a slope of loose rocks, and makes his way to his horse. Escaping the Forbidden Mountain wasn't as easy as the prince might have hoped, and he did have to fight his way out, but he made it.

However, the goblins weren't going to quit as easily as that. Once the Prince got out o the castle, they tried to drop boulders on him from a high ledge, but the fairies turned the boulders into bubbles. Then the goblins tried shooting Prince Philip with arrows, but the fairies turned the arrows into flowers. Finally, the goblins poured a scalding liquid over an archway, so the waterfall would block Prince Philip's escape, but the fairies turned the scalding waterfall into a rainbow, and the prince got out under it. The fairies even turned that annoying raven to stone.

In real life, we talk about how God always makes it possible for us to win against the various struggles of life, but He doesn't make it easy for us. Now, I'm not so sure. If Prince Philip hadn't looked up, he might not have noticed the boulders, the arrows, or the scalding waterfall. At least, not until it was too late. But he still would have gotten past them. With absolutely no effort at all on his part, Prince Philip got past all those obstacles and rode off toward King Stephan's castle, simply because the fairies were helping him.

I wonder how many boulders and arrows there are in our lives, of which we may only be partially aware, which would easily destroy us if God weren't protecting us from them. How many times would something have crushed my spirits or steered me down the wrong path, but God saw fit to protect me from them? Granted, there are some obstacles in life that we have to face head-on with minimal heavenly assistance, like the goblins that fought Prince Philip after he left his cell, but even so, God provides us with the weapons of righteousness that we need to defeat them.

Maybe God does make life easy for us. At the very least, He makes it easy enough that we can actually win. And for the most part, we have no idea how challenging life would be if God wasn't giving us any help at all. If it weren't for the fairies, Prince Philip would never have gotten out of his cell. And even if he had, he would have had a hard time fighting off the goblins armed only with an ax. If he had managed that, he still would have been crushed by boulders, pierced by arrows, or burned by scalding liquid. If it hadn't been for the three good fairies, Philip never would have made it out alive.

***

We have no idea how lucky we are that God is on our side. We have no idea how hard life would be without His help. Most of us think that life is hard enough already, but it would be practically impossible without heavenly aid. I'm grateful that God has always been pulling for me, taking care of problems that I never even see. When this life is over, and we look back with clearer vision, I think we'll be surprised at how much help we've really been getting, and how much harder life would have been without it.