Kindle Notes & Highlights
STORY IS HOW WE FIGURE THINGS OUT
Story is the language of the heart.
“Stories are equipment for living,” says Hollywood screenwriting teacher Robert McKee. He believes that we go to the movies because we hope to find in someone else’s story something that will help us understand our own. We go “to live in a fictional reality that illuminates our daily reality.”
Start with the movies you love. I’m serious. Think about your favorite movies. Notice that every good story has the same ingredients. Love. Adventure. Danger. Heroism. Romance. Sacrifice. The Battle of Good and Evil. Unlikely heroes. Insurmountable odds. And a little fellowship that in hope beyond hope pulls through in the end.
Next, I want you to notice that all the great stories pretty much follow the same story line. Things were once good, then something awful happened, and now a great battle must be fought or a journey taken. At just the right moment (which feels like the last possible moment), a hero comes and sets things right, and life is found again.
He has planted eternity in the human heart. (3:11 NLT)
For when you were born, you were born into an Epic that has already been under way for quite some time.
How wonderful to discover that God has never been alone. He has always been Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God has always been a fellowship. This whole Story began with something relational.
It is impossible that it simply started of its own accord, by an accident. Just as implausible (as the argument goes) that a Swiss watch will come together if you toss a thousand parts in your clothes dryer and start it all banging round.
Now that I am grown, my greatest joys come not from the adventures I take alone, but from the adventures I invite my wife and sons into. We climb mountains and canoe rivers and eat an entire package of Oreos in one sitting. We laugh and talk and wrestle and find more joy in anything because it is shared.
And there was war in heaven. —REVELATION 12: 7
Every story has a villain because yours does.
Though most of you do not live like it.
Real angels are mighty, glorious, dreadful beings, more powerful than you can imagine.
This is precisely what the Bible (and all the stories that echo it) has warned us about all these years: we live in two worlds—or in one world with two halves, part that we can see and part that we cannot. We are urged, for our own welfare, to act as though the unseen world (the rest of reality) is, in fact, more weighty and more real and more dangerous than the part of reality we can see. Here is why. BETRAYAL AND MUTINY You were the model of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone adorned you: ruby, topaz and emerald,
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“Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst. Of all created beings the wickedest is one who originally stood in the immediate presence of God” (C. S. Lewis).
Pride entered Lucifer’s heart.
I am staggered by the level of naïveté that most people live with regarding evil. They don’t take it seriously. They don’t live as though the Story has a Villain.
One of the things that surprised me when I first read the New Testament seriously was that it talked so much about a Dark Power in the universe—a mighty evil spirit who was held to be the Power behind death, disease, and sin . . . Christianity thinks this Dark Power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong. Christianity agrees . . . this is a universe at war. (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity)
Yes, God and his angels won. Through force of arms. But power is not the same thing as Goodness. Anyone who has met a bully knows this. Just because you’re stronger doesn’t mean you can be trusted.
My wife’s body is brighter and more fascinating than a flower, shier than any animal, and more breathtaking than a thousand sunsets. To me her body is the most awesome thing in creation. Trying to look at her, just trying to take in her wild, glorious beauty . . . I catch a glimpse of what it means that men and women have been made in the image of God. (Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage)
I daresay we’ve heard a bit about original sin, but not nearly enough about original glory, which comes before sin and is deeper to our nature. We were crowned with glory and honor. Why does a woman long to be beautiful? Why does a man hope to be found brave? Because we remember, if only faintly, that we were once more than we are now.
