Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty.
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Frankly there isn’t anyone you couldn’t learn to love once you’ve heard their story.
Storytelling is joke telling. It’s knowing your punchline, your ending. Knowing that everything you’re saying from the first sentence to the last is leading to a singular goal and ideally confirming some truth that deepens our understanding of who we are as human beings.
When you can no longer tell your own story without telling his, that’s when you have become a Christian.
From the Big Bang…
Our world is now understood to be a world where something really happens; the whole story of the world need not have been written down in the first quantum like a song on the disk of a phonograph. The whole matter of the world must have been present at the beginning, but the story it has to tell may be written step by step.
The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.
The universe is made up of stories, not of atoms.
The first person asks, “What time is it?”
The second person looks at watch and replies, “Now.”
First person ponders for a moment and then says, “That’s a pretty boring answer.”
Second person retorts, “Is not. It’s the least boring answer imaginable.”
God Must Have Foreseen
So God must have foreseen all my sins and rebellions against Him, all the trouble I would cause Him, including the hell of Calvary. Yet He chose to create me. (The word foreseen is not perfect in this context, for it seems to put God into time. But it helps to get across the point.)
God knew that I would be like Adam and Peter and Pilate, and even Judas. He knew that my sin would necessitate His crucifixion if His love was to be successful in winning my soul. In the act of creation He saw the Cross. Yet, knowing the infinite price to Himself, He still chose to create me. He loved me despite the nails I put into His own body. He prayed for me from the Cross and said, “Father, forgive them.” (Luke 23:24) even as I crucified Him. What crazy love is this? It is love itself. It is love of the Author who chose to create a story with His own hellish agony in it, so that He could create a story with my heavenly joy in it.
Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel. A facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal. We are intimately related. May we never even pretend that we are not.
Have you heard my favorite story that came from the Seattle Special Olympics? Well, for the 100-yard dash there were nine contestants, all of them so-called physically or mentally disabled. All nine of them assembled at the starting line and at the sound of the gun, they took off. But not long afterward one little boy stumbled and fell and hurt his knee and began to cry. The other eight children heard him crying; they slowed down, turned around and ran back to him. Every one of them ran back to him. One little girl with Down Syndrome bent down and kissed the boy and said, “This’ll make it better.” And the little boy got up and he and the rest of the runners linked their arms together and joyfully walked to the finish line. They all finished the race at the same time. And when they did, everyone in that stadium stood up and clapped and whistled and cheered for a long, long, time. People who were there are still telling the story with great delight. And you know why. Because deep down, we know that what matters in this life is more than winning for ourselves. What really matters is helping others win too. Even if it means slowing down and changing our course now and then.
Theories and Stories
Theories lie more easily than stories. That is why our psychologists tell us we are good and our novelists tell us we are evil.