I used to think God wanted me to write a great story with my life, but I’m learning He actually wants me to be a part of His.
Nobody plans to fail. No one counts on having their dreams broken, hopes dashed, or loved ones lost. In our ideal picture of life, everything always goes well. And why not?
We expect great things in life: close friends, happy marriages, connected families, fulfilling jobs, effective ministries. God says he has great plans for us of prosperity and good fortune. Why shouldn’t we aim for greatness?
What we don’t expect is God ruining our story.
We don’t expect being overlooked for the promotion or turned down by the girl of our dreams.
I didn’t expect to kiss my Mom goodbye with tubes sticking out of her mouth only days before my wedding. I never anticipated feeling deep grief and great joy every year my anniversary rolled around.
In life, we hope for something significant, something that tells us we matter, we’re loved, and the world wouldn’t be the same without us. But it shatters us when God, the one who says He loves us most, takes away the very elements of life that give us our sense of worth. When He messes up our story we begin to doubt He’s actually good.
God created us for story.
John Eldredge calls story the language of the heart because life is not a list of propositions, but a series of dramatic scenes. It used to be everyone had a story. Cultures primarily communicated their history through narrative told from one generation to the next accompanied with sketches, illustrations or songs regularly reminding people of the greater story beyond themselves.
God communicates through story. The early writers of the Bible often broke out into poems and songs intended to help depict a more complete picture of the Truth they were communicating. Jesus even intertwined his most profound truths in parables. God is the creator of story and the Author of the one in which we find ourselves living. It is in His story we find meaning for birth, death, love and loss.
Everything we experience personally can be interpreted and understood when we see it through God’s narrative.
Thanks to the printing press and the age of reason, however, we have lost touch with His story. Some tried dismissing the notion that there is an Author while maintaining the idea that we could still have a larger story, that life could make sense. But as Eldredge points out, “once we had rid ourselves of the Author, it didn’t take long to lose the larger story.”[1]
All we have left, then, are our own personal stories. Even we as Christians have subtly agreed with the idea that there is no larger story, that what happens to me is completely unrelated with what happens to you.
But something tells us there’s more.
We hope for a role that is given to someone else. A close loved one gets snatched away in an instant. Those we look to for support and friendship fail to meet our needs for community.
Although we’re convinced there should be meaning behind it all, it seems more like random events to our own personal stories. Life feels like a series of images and emotions without any rhyme or reason.
So what do we do?
We create our own story line.
We conclude that if we want meaning in life it’s up to us to write a meaningful story. We makeshift a calling, role, or project that feels significant, looks glorious and wows other so we don’t have to deal with the lull of not having anything great to tell people about.
We move on to the next big vision, project or dream so we can escape the reality that someone we loved deeply has been taken forever from our lives. Or we withdraw from people altogether in order to remain in control and protect ourselves from words or lack of meaningful pursuit.
Men become legends in their own minds through business, sports, or even ministry. Women find their satisfaction in beauty, health products, and even their family.
Unfortunately, the church has also created its own story line by meshing the Kingdom of God with the kingdoms of this world.
Little heavens on earth—that’s what our dreams are.
We try—we really do—to create a story large enough to explain our own conglomeration of happenings. But in the end it fails. The story isn’t large enough. Something always happens that is out of our control.
Usually, that something hurts deep within our souls. It ruins the story we are busy writing. And who gets blamed?
God. Because god is the only answer big enough for thing we don’t understand.
At the bottom of our deepest pain isn’t the fact that we are let down by those we look to for love; it’s that we can’t believe God would allow us to face disappointment.
The grief I feel every time November 6 shows up on the calendar isn’t that my Mom is gone; it’s that I can’t believe someone who calls himself good would take away someone I deeply valued.
As long as I try to explain events of this life with the story I’m carefully writing, I’ll only continue toward despair because I can’t explain the tragedy. Neither can I find a way out.
There is an alternative route, another solution to the mess we’re in.
It’s to accept the story El Olam, the God of Eternity, is writing with this world. It’s to acknowledge the fact that mankind is broken and bent toward doing life without its Author.
Yes, there is deep, deep pain in the tragedy of God’s story. But with every painful event comes new opportunities to tell the story of grace, of the way God is reconciling His broken creation back to what He intended it to be all along.
God has not lost control. He’s simply wowing us on a greater scale than we can comprehend.
But His story is large enough to explain missed opportunities and broken relationships. He is fully capable of piecing together the seemingly random parts of grief and joy and creating a picture of exquisite beauty.
Loss and love, joy and pain all make sense in the narrative of God’s great story.
What happens when life and God collide?
The Cross. And without the Cross, without a risen Savior who died for the brokenness of God’s creation and can now make all things new, there is no story worth telling.
God invites you and I to bring our hopes and dreams, both fulfilled and dashed, to His throne of grace and offer them as part of His story. He wants to weave into our chapters the miraculous theme of reconciliation so we can enjoy to the fullest the depth of His love and grace and experience the thrill of being a part of something truly significant.
You can either keep trying to write your own story, or become a part of God’s. It is possible to live on this earth and refuse to participate in God’s great drama. But that only ends in death, an eternal suffering of meaningless pain.
Become a part of God’s story and end your life with an eternal weight of glory far beyond the level of suffering you experience today.
For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! -2 Corinthians 4:17 NLT
Have you found yourself trying to write your own story line in life? What is it you struggle with the most when it comes to accepting the one God is already writing? Share in the comments.
[1] Brent Curtis & John Eldredge, The Sacred Romance (1997), p. 40
