A few years ago while on one of those marvelous sabbaticals you provide for me, I visited the village of Kirriemuir in Perthshire, Scotland. My father’s cousin is a retired Church of Scotland minister there. I had a lovely visit and a walk in the glen with a long-lost relative that is as much kindred in spirit as flesh. Anyway, I met Uncle Jim in the town center in front of a lithe statue of Peter Pan in prancing pose. Kirriemuir, you see, is the hometown of one James Barrie, the author of Peter Pan.

Pan is back in our minds due to the Oscar-nominated movie, Finding Neverland, starring the irrepressible (and to the women, irresistible) Johnny Depp. The movie tells the back story of the playwright James Barrie and his relationship to the family that gave rise to the play. It glosses over some of the hard realities of Barrie’s life and especially his relationship to the boy Peter, for whom Pan is supposedly named. But then the whole story is about avoiding hard realities by flights of fancy into the world of the imagination. So why quibble? Well, we quibble because we all grow up in stories. And this one is about not growing up, about facing the harshness of life and evil and disappointment and death and grief by not facing it.

Now, I know I am about to be judged a curmudgeon, so let me stipulate that I quite enjoyed the movie and do believe in imagination, not just cold hard facts. In fact, I believe imagination to be the God-given organ of faith that allows to see the unseeable and to imagine the unimaginable. But stay with me for a minute. At one pivotal moment after the death of Peter’s mother, Barrie is consoling Peter in the wake of the loss now of both parents. He tells the boy that he can always be with his mother by use of his imagination. All he has to do is go to Neverland, and he will find her there.

In some ways this is a sweet story to help a child deal with grief, but it lacks the staying power of the Jesus story that we consider today. No one in the Palm Sunday parade shouting Hosannas was thinking about tragedy, disappointment, or death. The presence of the children and the palm fronds and all the fever and fervor of the crowds suggest a youth movement that they imagined would take them right to the place of their dreams. No one imagined that Jesus would waltz right into Jerusalem and boot the Romans out without a fight; but let’s be clear: no one imagined that he would fight by refusing to fight with the weapons of the world. No one imagined that he would defeat death by dying. No one imagined that God would use human betrayal and religious violence and spiritual blindness as the instruments of redemption. No one imagined that his death would be as much his will and God’s as the will of his enemies. No one imagined that while the outer truth of the cross is hate, the inner truth of it is love. And no one imagined that losing Neverland, rejecting the mechanisms of escape and denial and medication of pain, would be the true path to innocence instead of the loss of it.

But that is just what happens. That is just how things turn out. That is just the gospel truth of the cross of Christ.

Not all losses are bad for us. Judith Viorst may be best known for her children’s works, such as the wonderful, fabulous, extra good, very great book, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Alexander has one of those days we all have where everything seems to go wrong and there’s no fixing it. Among other things he wakes up with gum in his hair. His mother forgets the dessert in his lunch; he has to buy plain white sneakers because the store is all out of his size in the cool red ones like his brother got; the dentist says he has a cavity that needs filling; and then he falls in the mud and his brother calls him a crybaby. Alexander dreams of running away to Australia, which is a bit like flying off to Neverland. But his mother tucks him in and lets Alexander know that they have terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days in Australia, too.

This is just what a parent needs to do. Too many parents try to fix their kids’ problems instead of letting them experience disappointment. They want to preserve their innocence, but they end up interceding for them with teachers and coaches and others instead of teaching them to face reality, which sometimes, well, bites. Children losing their innocence is not all bad, if the innocence they lose is about the trustworthiness of the world and not the trustworthiness of God.

The Jesus story teaches us just that. But it teaches us to face reality, not run from it. It teaches us about loss for the sake of gain. And that’s where the grown-up book of Judith Viorst comes in. Here’s the title, ready? Necessary Losses: The Loves, Illusions, Dependencies, and Impossible Expectations That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Grow. How’s that for a title? You hardly need the book after a title like that. How different from the attitude we carry round with us most of the time, which is typified in the cartoon in the current edition of The New Yorker magazine. Two women are talking on a sidewalk. One says to the other: I’m doing a lot better now that I’m back in denial. We hold on to certain loves, illusions, dependencies, and impossible expectations because we like imagining that things are or can be other than they are. We think we can fix anything, and we can’t. The only way to grow is to grow up. It is true that Jesus says we must become like little children in order to inherit the kingdom of God, but he means we are to be childlike in our trust of God, not childish in a Peter Pan way.

One necessary loss to accept is youth. Our society is so youth-oriented that the loss of it scares us to death by making us face our pending death. Cosmetics, plastic surgery, fitness gyms: these are just a few of the ways we try to cheat the aging process. Michael Jackson might be the ultimate example. It’s no wonder that his estate is called Neverland and he wants children around him all the time. Putting aside the question of whether pedophilia factors in, his surgeries and his disposal of all adults, including his wives, even the mother of his children, suggest his inability to give up on a childhood he thinks he missed and now must manufacture.

Getting older is no bargain. It feels like you feel more than you used to. Used to be your body just went about its business quietly. You start getting older, and it talks to you. Mostly you don’t like what it has to say. Body parts betray you, too, don’t you know?! You spend more time with doctors and standing in line at pharmacies than chasing tennis balls or drinking double-Dutch chocolate milk shakes. But accepting certain losses like those can open you to new experiences of life and love that would never come if you insisted on holding on to youth.

I remember talking to a friend once whose wife of more than 20 years was doing everything possible to leave him for another man. She would simply not own up to him about how things were, and he would not own up to what was going on, either. The denial was itself a marital conspiracy. The marriage was broken, and he kept thinking he could fix it just by holding on and loving her until she came to her senses. In the meantime, he was becoming more resentful and humiliated, embarrassed and angry. He had to accept that sometimes marriages become sick unto death, just the way people do. With early intervention and treatment, they can get well, but living in a dead marriage is like keeping a rotting corpse in your house and refusing to bury it. Denial doesn’t make it any less dead. One caution: don’t bury a marriage alive!

The better way forward is forward. Notice that Jesus acknowledges that one of his friends will betray him. He understands that this is the course of his life. If he is to love God and the world to the end, if he is to do what is good in the face of evil, if he is to refuse to live in denial about what is happening to him and around him, then these things must be. His is a necessary loss. The only way to remove the stinger from the bee is to suffer the sting. The world could only grow if the one who represents us all would accept what we would not. The Son of Man goes as it is written of him, Jesus says. That is, Jesus grew up in stories, too. He knew the Bible. He knew that he could not fulfill his purpose in life by running from it.

Ashley Smith taught us all about that this week. She was the hostage of Brian Nichols, the 33-year-old Atlanta man who pulled off a deadly shooting spree in a courtroom and escaped into Ashley Smith’s apartment. When he first found Ms. Smith, he thought it a random meeting. By the time he let her go some seven hours later, he believed something else. In her report of their ordeal, she said that at one point he said he thought that I was an angel sent from God. And that I was his sister and he was my brother in Christ. And that he was lost and God led him right to me to tell him that he had hurt a lot of people. It’s odd that Ashley would be called an angel, because for much of her life she was anything but. As a teenager she was convicted of shoplifting and later of drunken driving and battery. She married a party boy, and three-and-a-half years ago, he died in her arms—a stabbing victim, possibly at the hand of someone in his drinking crowd. But she was growing in her faith and learning about how you cannot control what happens to you or change what you have done, but you can decide what you will make of the reality you face today. She read the Bible to him and also Chapter 33 of the best-selling book by Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life. She convinced him that the violence he had done was wrong, that he had to face that and decide what to do with the rest of his life, even if behind bars. He decided that he would spend the rest of life witnessing to inmates, telling them about Ashley, about kindness, about receiving God’s forgiveness and letting life come to you instead of making it happen.

This was Judas’s great sin, you know. He betrayed Jesus, of course, but he betrayed himself, too. He believed that the kingdom of God could come only through the violent overthrow of Rome. He knew only one way to live: you have to get your way any way you can. The end justifies the means. This is the only life there is to hope for, and it is up to us to make it so. Jesus knows something else, something better, something we must come to know ourselves. He knows that the kingdom of God is a gift that is given to those who open their hands to what God wants to bring to pass. They do not raise fists against others in order to order their world according to their own designs.

Jesus did for us and on our behalf what we would never do. He loved God and others from beginning to end. He did not run from his purpose in life. He trusted that the God who is love would love us to death and beyond. If you want to gain the kingdom, you must lose Neverland. You must face life as it comes, knowing that what is comes from God is a love stronger than death, a love that will not let you go. Your life might not turn out the way you imagined, but it might yet turn out good, and maybe even better than you could have imagined.