Stories. I love them!

 

What do I love about them?

 

Some are written. Some are only told. Some fade from memory like calico that has been left too long in the bright summer sun. Some are tucked away for safe keeping in a pocket only to be lost when we discover the pocket had a tear in it. Some lay unfinished on the floor of our dreams.

 

Some stories are true. Other stories are a tale made up of imaginings and bits and pieces of the realities we or others have lived. Others still are only imaginings that are so unique that they do not fit into any reality at all.

 

Some stories are valued in and of themselves. Some stories are only valued as they coincide with other stories and some stories are deemed unworthy of the telling by those who do not even own their own story.

 

God is the BEST storyteller! He is the Author of our life, of each of our lives.

 

 We come into this world in the midst of a large exciting story that is being played out on the earth, under the earth, and in the heavens above us. Most of us do not recognize this. We also don’t recognize that we are helping to create a story.

 

God, our Creator, creates us and places us in the midst of His large story. Each of us has a part to play. He has designed it that way. He has written us into the story to reveal something about Him.

 

 What we are ‘writing’ may be haphazard initially, much like a new artist tries different colors and textures on a canvas to determine what will most suit what he wants to portray. Those around us may suggest what we paint or write, what colors or words to use, what textures to feature. If we are very young, we can be highly influenced by what they suggest.

 

It can be easy to forget (if we ever knew) that no one else should be writing our story.

 

 Of course we don’t know very much about writing so we need someone else to guide us. Only after we have accepted the Lord and acknowledge that He is the true Author of our story can we allow Him to guide us and lead us as a co-author with Him.

 

If we try to write without Him, our stories will never reveal His larger story and never give a glimpse of Him that we have the opportunity to reveal in our own unique role that is unfolding.

 

There is a great deal that influences our story. Some of it occurs before we come to know Him. It has lots of twists and turns in it, full of places where we intersect with others both human and divine.

 

What do we do with those parts of our story?

 

First, we must come to know and own our story, to recognize it, value it, and recognize that we have both defined it and been defined by it. When we invite the Lord into our lives, we have the opportunity to pick up the loose and tangled threads of our story and hand them to Him.

 

Something miraculous happens when we hand Him those bits and pieces, scraps often smudged and torn. The Lord knits them together as a backdrop to allow His beauty to be clearer somehow. Nothing is ever wasted with Him. No matter how we may have failed or marred the beginning of the story, He redeems it.

 

We can regret deeply those parts of what we have “written” before we knew Him. We can even see (if we look closely and are honest) that we have tangled some of the threads of our story after we knew Him.

 

If we look at our story carefully, we can see what the Lord has been up to all along. Yes, we made choices that were often not the best, not His desire for us, but when we give our story to Him the very darkest parts of our story allow His beauty and light to shine more brightly.

 

What lines will you add to your story today?

 

Where does He want to take you in the story?

 

What does He want to show you and me that will make this unique story one of His masterpieces, one that uses both the best and worst of you and me to make something known about Him?

 

I can’t wait to see what comes next.