a fairy tale.

It is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight.
It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful things too.
It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil,
love against hate,
order against chaos,
in a great struggle where often it is hard to be sure who belongs to which side
because appearances are endlessly deceptive.
Yet for all its confusion and wildness, it is a world where
the battle goes ultimately to the good, who live happily ever after,
and where in the long run everybody,
good and evil alike, becomes known by his true name...
That is the fairy tale of the Gospel with, of course,
one crucial difference from all the other fairy tales,
which is that the claim made for it is that
it is true,
that it not only happened once upon a time
but has kept happening ever since
and is happening still.
-Frederick Buechner Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale