There's No Such Thing As A Dragon
There’s no such thing as a dragon.
There is no such thing as a dragon. They are mythic creatures.
As a horrifying combination of birds of prey and snakes, what makes dragons particularly terrifying is the fact they also breathe fire and carry an armour of impenetrable scales.
Dragons tend to protect things of high value; gold and other precious jewels are some of their favoured treasures.
In the children’s book, ‘There’s No Such Thing as a Dragon’, Billy Bixbee notices one in his bedroom. It’s small and rather curious to Billy, and he tells his mother about it.
‘There’s no such thing as a dragon’, Billy’s mother replies.
It’s then that the dragon starts to grow.
Over the course of the short story, the dragon continues to cause havoc in the house of the Bixbees — to the point where the dragon picks up the house and runs off down the street. It’s only when the dragon is recognised and named by the family that it returns to its original size; small and manageable.
Perhaps dragons do exist.
They present themselves to us in the guise of things that cause us to be anxious, worried or fearful (work stress, family dynamics, money etc).
Avoiding or pretending these things don’t exist causes the dragon (so to speak) to grow. Very soon it becomes something so large and terrifying that it can cause the very home we once knew to no longer exist.
It takes a person of tremendous courage to voluntarily confront this. In the absence of courage, it may take a group of people (a band of dwarves, a Hobbit and a wizard) to face the dragon together.
It may take some prayer to give us courage to face the dragons in our lives. And to give courage (en-courage) our kids to do the same in theirs.
Because there is immeasurable treasure that can be gained from voluntarily confronting such terrifying things.
Numbers 21:4-9
