Noah, build a giant boat and fill it with your family and tons of animals even though everyone will laugh. Your success will be the last laugh and the restart of the world.
Abraham, leave your home country and wait until you are 100 years old to receive that child I promised. Your success will grow long after you leave earth and will open the door for God's revelation of himself.
Mary, I know you are a young teen but I have chosen you to handle all the chatter and scandal that will come from your mysterious (even to you) pregnancy. Your success will be hung on a cross for you to watch, that heartbreak for you to bear.Noah, Abraham and Mary stepped into the stories God had already written for them, long before one of them came to be.
God is author extraordinaire, yet we assume that he either hasn't a story for us or it will be too scary, too unmanageable, or too far from what we want our stories to be. So we resist, hesitate, ignore, run away.
Speaking of running away, Jonah tried. Somewhere along the way, he must have told God he would willingly step into his story. When he balked, he spent time in a fish, after which he got vomited onto the beach. Roundabout success in helping Nineveh.What's not to love about the stories God writes with real people and their lives and their feelings and their circumstances?
He writes us as incredible stories with absolutely no regard for our comfort, yet the most compassionate regard for our rescue.
They say curiosity kills the cat. I wish for people enough curiosity to enter the story God has written for them. What will be killed is the do-it-ourselves story that we want to write based on a sliver of understanding, a speck of historical perspective, a granule of knowing who we could be if coached by the right storyteller.
Yes, he's a weird storywriter but his version, if we trust and enter into it, is the only one with a truly happy ending.
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