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Archives: March 2010
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Archives: March 2010
The story of your life
Stephen King, the famous horror novelist, talks about how he goes about writing his books. He has an initial idea, closes his eyes, and pretty much writes what he sees happening. This way, as the novel progresses, even he’s surprised by the twists and turns and it’s this that keeps people turning the pages.
But he would say he’s not making it up as he goes along.
In his book “On Writing” he describes how a story is like a fossil in the ground. It exists from pre-history. An author digs it out using tools like adjectives and sentences to dig it out and brush it down.
And God’s call on our lives is a bit like this. It’s as though God has an idea of who we are: our potential. And yet we can work to figure out what this potential is, what the story of our lives is going to be. So when God says he chose us before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1v4) when he formed us in our mother’s womb (Psalm 139v13), it’s obvious that he has a clear idea of who we are.
A lot of life is about growing up to figure out who that is and what we’re to do.
Perhaps the best way to illustrate that is with the idea of Jesus. I’ll borrow this idea from Dorothy Sayers, the contemporary of CS Lewis. She said God was a bit like writing a book, that you can explain the Trinity like this: God the Father is the ‘idea’: the firm reality of what the book is about – Stephen King’s fossil in the ground. Jesus is like ‘the book’, the actual process of drafting chapters, editing and deleting, and honing in on what the idea is like. Jesus figured out ‘the idea’ (the Father) in ‘the book’ of his life. That’s why Jesus can say, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John14 v 9). Jesus has made perfect the representation of the ‘idea’ of the Father. The Holy Spirit then communicates the book to the reader.
So perhaps it is that we are to work out the ‘idea’ that God has of who we are. That like Jesus, we put flesh on that idea, figuring out both who you are and what you do. And we edit as we go.
When you’re writing a book (I’ve only ever tried to write one) you start describing a character and what they say. It can be tempting to make the character say and do things that, really, that person wouldn’t do. When you re-read the page you’ve just written you think, “That’s not very truthful to the character” and you have to delete what they said and put in what they actually would say. Similarly in our lives, we can drift from the true idea of who we are. Perhaps we get into a relationship or a habit that just isn’t us. It’s not the end of the world, but we need to be honest and say, “That’s not really me, this doesn’t fit,” when I sit in God’s presence this isn’t how he sees me: then press ‘delete’ on that behaviour or relationship and start on a fresh page.
For me, this makes sense of the different things that God then talks to me about, through dreams, prophetic words, and my own ambitions. God might say, “You will go to Africa” or “You will work in TV”. We have an idea of where the chapters of our lives are going to be, but we don’t necessarily know the order of them.
To this end we can sort of relax about how this process gets figured out and when things happen. Writing a book is a lot of work, but we don’t have to know the whole plot before we start writing it. So, likewise, we can trust the Father who knows every page of our lives before it’s written. We just live each day, trying to keep true to our conscience and faithful to our hopes and planning a little for the future. Because we don’t know everything, all the twists and turns keep us turning the pages.
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