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January 11 - January 21, 2024
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.
IF THE POINT of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation.
the point wasn’t the search but the transformation the search creates.
we were designed to live through something rather than to attain something, and the thing we were meant to live through was designed to change us. The point of a story is the character arc, the change.
his story was better than mine for the simple fact that his story was actually happening. He was doing real things with real people while I’d been typing words into a computer.
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. Though their situations may be terrible, at least they have a sense of control; at least they know what to expect. Change presents a world of variables that are largely out of their control.
The most often repeated commandment in the Bible is “Do not fear.” It’s in there over two hundred times. That means a couple of things, if you think about it. It means we are going to be afraid, and it means we shouldn’t let fear boss us around.
But fear isn’t only a guide to keep us safe; it’s also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.
It made me wonder if the reasons our lives seem so muddled is because we keep walking into scenes in which we, along with the people around us, have no clear idea what we want.
Neither needed the other to make everything okay. They were simply content to have good company through life’s conflicts. I thought that was beautiful.
The truth is, we can make things a little better or a little worse, but utopia doesn’t hang in the balance of our vote or of what products we buy.
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.
When we look back on our lives, what we will remember are the crazy things we did, the times we worked harder to make a day stand out.
It wasn’t necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.
