Sitting down. Getting comfortable. Settling in. Picking up a new book is an interesting and unique feeling. If you are reading it for the first time, you have no idea what kind of journey you are about to embark on. Yet, you know enough about the book to be pick it up and snuggle into your favorite chair or coffee shop to invest your life into it. You have weighed your life without this tale and with it and have decided that the time lost consuming the pages is nothing compared to your life with these stories, characters, victories and loses.
For me the hardest part of the book is the last ten pages. In movie terms, this is the last scene just before the credits start to roll. It is after the climax, where the plot is resolved. The losers have lost and the winners have won. The only thing left is the final resolution. All the strings are tied neatly into one cord. Sometimes there is a one string left unresolved or cut loose from the rest at the last moment to get you hooked for the next movie, but I think this is greedy. Just finish the book already.
I feel like getting to know God is like reading a new book. We hear about Him from others in our lives, from ladies with big hair on TV, in music and from the echoing well deep within us. One day we sit down, focus and open the relationship with Him to see where it will lead us.
The beginning are the character introductions. This is God. God. This is me. Then the setting starts to get laid out. Where are you in life, who else is around you, what are the circumstances of your existence, what are your struggles, your faults, your failures. I don't think God is interested in nature anymore. He created the mountains, seas and animals, enjoyed them, saw a million sunsets and then decided to create man. He wanted someone else to enjoy them. He wanted to enjoy someone else enjoying them, like a chef watches the critic scoop up the first soup full of soup or a mustached custom bike builder has a big reveal of his new creation and revs the engine so that everyone can feel the power. I think He sees the settings of our lives not in location, but in station. Who are we surrounded by, who do we influence, who influences us.
The conflict is already in the setting of people, but God starts to work. The conflicts are resolved. Small ones, big ones, ones we didn't even know existed. The conflict resolution stage of my life lasted a long time. My conflicts are never done, but after the beginning stages, I feel like the conflicts are less of the story and the relationship that has begun becomes the spot light.
No longer does my life revolve around conviction, confession and accountability, but it becomes about living in the victory that has been gained. The adventures are not longer internal, but they become external.
I think that this is where a lot of people stop growing because the story stops becoming about me and God and starts becoming about God and you. The main character in my story, me, becomes the vehicle of introducing people to God and getting them find a fire place, a comfy chair, a coffee shop with a corner window and to open their books.
Our lives after that moment are never the same. They may not be the adventures of David, Samson, Rambo or the 300, but we are never the same.
Your story with God is always evolving and always changing. I missed this for the first part of my life. I thought the book of my relationship with God was a short story. I read it. I knew it. I recounted it every time that I recited my testimony in front of others. I thought it was published, bound and sealed for His glory. Little did I know that my story with God was like the unresolved stories that frustrate me unceasingly. The story evolves, grows, dies, changes venues, characters, scenes and plots. It flows like a storm cloud across the blue sky of Montana. The wind pushes, pulls, up-heaves and saturates me with no end.
I think the thing that I crave the most is the adventure. Sure, there was a stage of my life where I only wanted the pain to stop and never thought it would. But then it did. Then I was bored. Then I was challenged, and challenged and then challenged some more by God and the people around me. Hell can be other people, but so can God.
My story is never over until it is over. He will never say I am done, until I am done. To get to hear those words is my goal, my dream, my desire.
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