At City Church, we love to remind each other of God's story of creation, fall, redemption, & renewal. We also strive to remind each other that God's story intersects with our own personal journey. Each Tuesday for the next 8 weeks, a City Church attender will be sharing a piece of their story on our blog of a time when this intersection was especially evident for them. Today's story comes from Lauren Bailes.
I am a reader and a writer. My earliest memories include sounding out words while nestled in the laps of my parents and then painstakingly tapping out stories of animal families on a typewriter (before typewriters were trendy home decor). For years, I taught middle schoolers that their stories mattered as much as the books we poured over together. Even now, I relish the work of translating abstractions into practice and fiddling with vocabulary, with sequence, and with structure to meet that end.
Through stories, I understand the world. Meg Murry of A Wrinkle in Time gives voice to my big-sister heart when she shouted through the veil of IT, “I love you, Charles Wallace, I love you.” I learn of Jesus as Lucy learns of Aslan when Mr. Beaver tells her that Aslan is not safe, but he is good – a proposition I repeatedly test and find true. Van Auken’s A Severe Mercy shows me the faithfulness of a near God amidst unspeakable pain. A Midsummer Night’s Dream warns me that earthly treasures are, “Mine own, and not mine own.” There Are No Children Here re-envisions me to build just cities and schools. Tattoos on the Heart brings me to tears when Father G mercifully and insistently reaches through one young man’s venomous veneer to identify a universal human need: “We all just want to be called the name our mom uses when she’s not pissed off at us.”
Stories are my sustenance. Yet I am immensely grateful to know that I am not the author of my own story. At each major plot point – college, my first teaching job, graduate school – I thought I had the story written, the location chosen, the characters in play, and the timeline set. The true Author, and the only one who can truly see the climax, has directed me through a story better designed for his glory and for my joy. I’ve begun to get the hang of this, because I’ve begun to attend to this Author’s story and notice patterns. I make a plan. It seems effective and efficient. I prepare for my story to unfold. Then: the twist. Inevitably, with all the formula of a weekly sitcom, another option emerges – Eastern University, then Brooklyn, then Ohio State, then UDel – that wasn’t even in my storyboard. And it’s better. The Author’s choices for me are always better. So I trust him incrementally more and more with my story.
The unresolved plotlines are the hardest because no amount of scheming on my part can bring about their satisfactory ends. Most of these stories are painful and worrisome. So I pray for the salvation of my brothers, diversity in my church, and compassion among our lawmakers. It is in the living of these plots that I am most prone to question the Author’s choices. Just fix this, I’ll mutter. If nothing is too great for you, prove it. My story and so many others are evidence of exactly that: God the Author writes a better story, remains steadfastly near the characters, and works each ending for good. So I work and read and await the denouement of the “story which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”