Sojourner’s Newsletter
Sojourners Awake!
Setting Aside your Problems to Solve Another's
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Setting Aside your Problems to Solve Another's

The Fairy and the Free
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When I started Sojourners Awake, I decided upon the name “sojourners” because of the old Latin word diurnum meaning under the day, or the old French word sojorn meaning a temporary visit.

Ecclesiastes 4:15 I saw that all who lived and walked under the sun followed this second one, the youth who succeeded the king. 16 There is no limit to all the people who were before them

It’s a great theme, for I can think of no better way to describe table top roleplaying games as “spending a day under the sun with another.” In truth, it’s not about the games, but the people we spend them with and indeed, life consists of many steps we take with many directions, but isn’t life truly about the ones who spend the journey underneath the sun with us during this temporary visit?

We are Sojourners.

In this episode of the Fairy and the Free, Tryina, the eladrin elf, suffers a setback after battling a sky serpent. Her beautiful skin stretches to the maximum length and her face sags to a floppy mess. She spends most of this session covering herself up, feeling pity for her plight and wishing for a way out of this curse.

As the storyteller, I posed a simple solution - give her an external problem so that she could focus on something else outside her own internal problems. Some might say that vanity pulls strongly at all of her decisions in life, but it is also clear that grotesquely loose skin makes for a hideous adventurer and is therefore a problem enough. But Triyna chose to solve her problem by overdosing on self-pity. And that’s why I posed another problem. Call it a distraction, or call it a lifesaver, but either way, the eladrin woman took the bait and set out to solve another’s problem.

I posed a prisoner trapped within a snow globe (don’t you hate it when that happens?) and this prisoner called out to the sojourners for release. Triyna spent the latter half of the session making an attempt to rescue this poor person in their hilarious plight. If she did this for any other reason that self-pity, may it come as a blessing that after rescuing the prisoner, the prisoner in turn quickly provided a magical herbal tea that would bring life and youth back into Triyna’s skin, and indeed giving her back a few years of that youthful skin.

When my own problems become too great for me to solve, and the only way out is rolling around in misery, may God send sojourners my way to remind me that I do no walk alone and turning my attention away from my own suffering is one way to find relief.

May your story continue!

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Sojourner’s Newsletter
Sojourners Awake!
Hi, I'm Jonathan. We play Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition as we share stories around the table.
https://www.sojournersawake.com - for blogs and articles on table top roleplaying games and homeschooling
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