Your Life as Narrative!

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What is your story? You are aware that you have a story, aren’t you? You do! Your story is undoubtedly rich, complex, inspiring, challenging, heartbreaking, heartwarming, compelling and authentic. All of these things – and so much more – are an integral part of your personal narrative. More integral than any of these is, however, the part played in your story by God. Yes, God is there! God is there, acknowledged or ignored. Life is narrative; if life is narrative then God is the ultimate narrator. Your life, just beneath its barest surfaces, may read as if no author was present, but your very existence and/or presence points toward story and story points toward an author. God is the ultimate author. Life is God’s story. Your life is the most beautiful narrative ever crafted! Do you live as if it were true?

There are two different ways to look at story and the part God plays in it.

1. God is already involved in your story; you just don’t realize it.

God is already involved in your story, but you just don’t realize it, or you vainly try to deny it. Life would be utterly impossible without God. God can, however, be discarded in the midst of life. Many of us live lives either totally removed from God, in innocent ignorance, or totally in spite of God, in willful and perpetual disobedience. The daily presence of God is, in either case, something we act as if we can live without. It’s true! We often live as if God was not present in life! Nothing could be further from the truth, in spite of our best efforts to live as if it were so! We may live as if God was not life’s reality, but lives vainly lived do not alter reality. God is still there, in the story. God is still there in spite of your vain but practiced daily denial. God is still there, ready and waiting to embrace all of you, as you embrace the entire story! So, know God is there, even if we refuse to acknowledge it. God is there, even if we live as if it were not so.
God’s daily presence in your story is acknowledged and embraced as reality.

2. God’s daily presence in your story is acknowledged and embraced as reality.

Yes, God is present and very much involved in our stories! You have joined your story to God’s story. Subsequently, God’s redemptive plot properly orders our lives and stories by identifying our everyday events and actions as foundations in need of serious redemption. If God’s redemptive history is the plot of each one of our stories, then our everyday events and actions constitute the plot. Consequently, each one of us becomes a major character in the story of God. Can you imagine? It is an absolutely amazing realization! Your life is narrative! Your narrative is built upon God’s redemptive plot. Your everyday events and actions consequently constitute the plot, and make you a major character in the story of God! It is awesome! You are an important part of God’s story! You are a major character in God’s story!

So, now that you have considered your active role in the story of God, what shall you write next? You see, God doesn’t write the story alone! No! God doesn’t want to write the story without you! God writes it with you! The story is shared between us and God. We write it together! So, the next chapter in your story is always a collaborative one! Where shall we go? The possibilities are endless, when we write in collaboration with the ultimate narrator. So, do have fun and do enjoy the lifecraft that is your story! Too, enjoy the God who invented and created it all! God enjoys you, after all! Dive into your story!

Related posts:

• Narrative Theology

• From Eternity To Here by Frank Viola

• Deconstruction

• An Anabaptist Expression of the Spirit-filled Life

• Five Life Lessons