The following comes from our summer intern, Chris Humphries:
What is your story? All of us have one, and they are all completely different. Every single day, our stories are being written, word-by-word, and chapter-by-chapter. Everything we do has an effect on how are story will be written for the moment we are in. The decisions we make and paths we choose to take are all factors into our stories, and factors into who we are and who we are making ourselves to be.
In his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Donald Miller examines story. He is asked by a movie producer to turn a previous book, Blue Like Jazz, into a movie. In order to do this, Don has to “edit” his life for the big screen. Essentially, he has to eliminate the boring and mundane, and spice it up a bit, emphasizing on the good parts and making up better parts to compromise for the rest. He uses a story about a man going to buy a Volvo to illustrate the worthlessness of a boring story:“The character’s ambition defines what the movie’s about, so if the character wants a Volvo the movie’s going to be about a guy who gets a Volvo or struggles to get a Volvo. And then if I watched a movie about a guy who got a Volvo I probably wouldn’t be very moved at the end of it. And so why should I expect if I’m going to spend the next five years saving up for a Volvo and get the Volvo that I would have any greater experience in my actual life?”
Miller uses the story to prove that in order for our lives to have meaning, we have to have desires, ambitions, and even conflict. True, there will be times when we want new cars; some of us may even want a Volvo. But, besides our material needs, our lives have to be going somewhere, and our stories have to be moving, instead of stuck in a writer’s block.
This is where our walk with Christ comes in. God let Jesus die so that our sins would be forgiven, and so that we would be in heaven with Him one day. He paid our debts because He loves us more than anyone ever could. There are a few ways we can let the story of our salvation in Jesus Christ affect our lives. We can choose to acknowledge that our sins have been forgiven, but not really let it affect how we live. It is so easy to forget the power of God and let that get lost in the process that being a Christian can become sometimes. Another way is that we can try to pay God back for His sacrifice, try to “leave a tip” for the tab He picked up for us. God does not need or want this from us. He wants us to live in the third way, which is to worship. He wants us to live our lives in devotion to Him, and live our lives in a way that doesn’t live to pay God back, but to simply worship and glorify him in every way.
We can find meaning in this story; it can give us something to live for. Cyprian Norwid, a Polish poet, once said, “You have to have something to live on, something to live for, and something to die for. Lack of one of these is drama, but lack of two is tragedy.” Without something to live for, we have nothing to die for. On Sunday, Bro. Perkins and Bro. Malone both asked us the question of what we would die for. What, for the sake of the body, is so big and so important that we would give it up, or lay down our lives? This is both the conflict and meaning in our stories. Christianity can be something that we use to fulfill ourselves, or it can be something that shakes us from our very core, and makes us question both the world and our lives so that we may be able to know the truth. In your story, what is your conflict, and what is your meaning? Are you living a story that is based around your desire to worship and obey God, or are you living a story that worships you and what you want to do? Jesus died for our sins so that His story may be our story and so that one day, we will understand the sacrifice and be with him, forever.
