Storytime

I’m addicted to stories. In particular, (as you see coming if you know me) love stories. Something fascinates me about how a couple met, what they did on their first date, how he proposed. Perhaps it is because I am still waiting for my own love story, wondering if it will look anything like theirs. Perhaps I like to hear their stories -- hoping that these stories might help me understand my own better.

I’m don’t think I’m alone in this. Students will be falling asleep, but then perk up when their teacher starts telling a story. Families will gather around a campfire, then launch into a time of telling stories. Before a little girl goes to sleep, she begs her daddy to tell her a story. We are addicted to stories. And I wonder if this is intentional. I wonder if hearing the stories of others helps us understand ours too. I wonder if humanity is a part of a larger, interconnected story.   

Okay, I don’t just wonder this -- I believe it firmly. I’ve devoted my life to studying a story, and the longer and longer I study it, the more and more beautiful it becomes to me. The longer and longer I study it, the more and more convinced I am that it is not just a story. It is my story. It is our story. So, my dear reader, please stick with me. I would like to tell you a story. I cannot do it full justice in this short space here, but I will do my best.  

Once upon a time, there was a powerful Creator who breathed out stars and oceans and wind in human lungs. He smiled as he set humans among lush green grass and galloping horses and sparkling fireflies, excited to walk with them as they discovered with delight every corner of His creation. They were His treasure. His representatives. His friends.

But before He could turn around, they were twisting His creation for their personal gain, perverting His order to put themselves in command. He let them have their way, but little did they know the chaos that would cause. Little did they know the Pandora’s Box they had opened. They had invited Death, the most unnatural of all phenomenons, into a once perfect world.

So they spiraled down. Further and further from their Creator and His intended order, higher and higher in their own estimation of themselves. They worshipped the sun and the moon and the stars, the cows and the cats and their children, their bodies and their beauty and their brilliance, anything but their Creator. Anything but their Creator. Their lives became as meaningless and temporary as a sudden gust of wind -- so drastically different from the glory, the legacy, and the intimacy He had created them to have.

So He chose from among them one, one who would show all the rest the destiny for which they were created. One man, one family, one nation, through whom He would show the world what it looked like to worship a powerful Creator who cares for human life and gives it order and purpose. This one family was set apart as His.

Yet so often they failed. They did not represent Him well; they could not accurately show the world what it looked like to be His. They were plagued by the same self-centeredness, distracted by the same vain desires, and haunted by the same Death as everyone else. Yet He did not give up on them, but through them devised an even greater plan. A plan to set them all free. To defeat the very heart of the human problem.

So when humans refused to worship the only One that deserved their reverence, when they failed to obey the laws intended to bring them life, when they fumbled in every effort of reaching their Creator -- He reached down to them. He walked on their lush grass again. He breathed their ocean air again. He laughed with His friends again. And He died for His friends. He died to destroy the sin that defaced them, and He rose again to defeat death’s suffocating stronghold.

He was the new chosen one. Through this one man, came a family, a movement, to show the world what it looks like to follow a powerful Savior who cares for human life and gives it restoration and resurrection. This one family is set apart as His, yet all are welcome to join. All are invited to come, come join the story He has been writing since the dawn of creation.      

This is the greatest love story ever told. And it is mine.