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The world is full of great challenges, terrible tragedies, and overwhelming joys—there is simply too much going on to be a part of a boring story.
Life has a peculiar feel when you look back on it that it doesn’t have when you’re actually living it.
Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in.
We think God is unjust, rather than a master storyteller.
The fact of life and the reality of death give the human story its dramatic tension.
One of the things that gives me hope is that, even with all the tragedy that happens in the world, the Bible says that when we get to heaven, there will be a wedding and there will be drinking and there will be dancing.
was like the roots of a tree that went miles into the soil and miles around its trunk and came up in my cousins, in their faces and their voices and their character. I didn’t think you could kill a tree that big. Not even God could kill a tree that big.
The thing about death is it reminds you the story we are telling has finality.
My uncle told a good story with his life, but I think there was such a sadness at his funeral because his story wasn’t finished. If you aren’t telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died. But my uncle died too soon.
A character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it is the basic structure of a good story.
If I have a hope, it’s that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically, into the story, and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as though to say, Enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you.
We don’t want to be characters in a story because characters have to move and breathe and face conflict with courage.
In truth, I was a person who daydreamed and then wrote down his daydreams.
And then I thought about God, who was never born and will never die, and how many generations have gone before him, making him the Grandfather ad infinitum, and how this perspective would not be unlike Edmond Browning’s, except multiplied by a thousand generations of new children come and gone, and the eternal experience of loving community before there were children at all. And
“Your life is a blank page. You write on it.”
It’s like that with writing books, and it’s like that with life. People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen. But joy costs pain.
People fear change, she said.
The most often repeated commandment in the Bible is “Do not fear.” It’s in there over two hundred times.
This is what happens when people walk away from me, Kathy. I have brought you to this place to show you something important. This is what happens when my compassion and love leave a place. It is when people do not allow God to show up through them, she realized, that the world collapses in on itself.
A story is made up of turns, Robert McKee says. Once an ambition has been decided, a positive turn is an event that moves the protagonist closer to the ambition, and a negative turn moves the protagonist away from his ambition.
The story made us different characters than we would have been if we had skipped the story and showed up at the ending an easier way.
The pain made the city more beautiful. The story made us different characters than if we’d showed up at the ending an easier way. It made me think about the hard lives so many people have had, the sacrifices they’ve endured, and how those people will see heaven differently from those of us who have had easier lives.
A writer of fiction can control all those elements, but as real-life protagonists we can control only what we do and say, what choices we make, what words we say.
I didn’t want to need his affirmation. But part of our selves is spirit, and our spirits are thirsty, and my father’s words went into my spirit like water.
The truth is, we are all living out the character of the roles we have played in our stories.
“Don, when something hard happens to you, you have two choices in how to deal with it. You can either get bitter, or better. I chose to get better. It’s made all the difference.”
I remembered about story, about how every conflict, no matter how hard, comes back to bless the protagonist if he will face his fate with courage.
ordered a ring, and we started premarital counseling and enjoyed the natural high the body creates to trick us into thinking another human being might rescue us, something I now believe is a lie that ends many marriages.
After a tragedy, I think God gives us a period of numbing as a kind of grace.
Perhaps he knows our small minds, given so easily to false hope, couldn’t handle the full brunt of reality.
when it occurred to me I was thirty-six and unable to navigate a serious relationship. I knew then the shock
was wearing off. A certain fear grew. They don’t have an emergency room for the kind of pain that is about to happen to me, I thought.
I told myself it wasn’t true, that I was a perfectly good person and God could change whatever it was that made me contemptible. I told myself there was still time. But counselors from hell spoke to me from under the pillows and behind the chairs until they had the big voice.
The essence of his whispers were that life, even amid the absurdity of human suffering, still had meaning.
misery, though seemingly ridiculous, indicates life itself has the potential of meaning, and therefore pain itself must also have meaning. Contrary
God says to Job, Job, I know what I am doing, and this whole thing isn’t about you.
There is an intrinsic feeling in nearly every person that your life could be perfect if you only had such-and-such a car or such-and-such a spouse or such-and-such a job. We believe we will be made whole by our accomplishments, our possessions, or our social status. It’s written in the fabric of our DNA that life used to be beautiful and now it isn’t, and if only this and if only that, it would be beautiful again.
And if both of these people aren’t careful, they’re going to get depressed because they thought the climax to their
substory was actually a climax to the human story, and it wasn’t. The human story goes on.
The truth is, the apostles never really promise Jesus is going to make everything better here on earth. Can you imagine an infomercial with Paul, testifying to the amazing product of Jesus, saying that he once had power and authority, and since he tried Jesus he’s been moved from prison to prison, beaten, and routinely bitten by snakes? I don’t think many people would be
buying that product. Peter couldn’t do any better. He was crucified upside down, by some reports. Stephen was stoned outside the city gates. John, supposedly, was boiled in oil. It’s hard to imagine how a religion steeped in so much pain and sacrifice turned into a promise for earthly euphoria.
What I love about the true gospel of Jesus, though, is that it offers hope. Paul
After the girl I’d dated had been in Switzerland for a while, and as I continued to see a counselor, I realized that for years I’d thought of love as something that would complete me, make all my troubles go away.
And that freed her to really love him as a guy, not as an ultimate problem solver.
They were simply content to have good company through life’s conflicts. I thought that was beautiful.
I’m trying to be more Danish, I guess. And the thing is, it works. When you
stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are. And when you stop expecting material possessions to complete you, you’d be surprised at how much pleasure you get in material possessions. And when you stop expecting God to end all your troubles, you’d be surprised how much you like spending time with God.
wondered about the story we were writing and wanted even more to write a better story for myself, something that leaves a beautiful feeling even as the credits roll.
They said the year the team won the story was great, but the year they lost the story was better, because the team that lost had sacrificed more.
It wasn’t necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.
