God's Story

I got out of reading fiction as I got close to graduating high school. I read the Lord of the Rings and after that it just seemed like everything else fell short. I tried picking up several different novels after that and I never could even make it halfway through the book before I got bored and set it down.

That’s when I really got into reading books on Christian Spirituality. Growing up in a Southern Baptist church, I was quite familiar with the idea that the Christian thing to do was to read Christian books. I attempted to follow this pattern by looking through some of the books my mother had read, but most of the books my mother read was about raising boys. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that my mother was reading those books because of me, but when I look back on the life I lived in high school I realize that my mother probably needed a little bit of help.

I decided to a bit of research and after talking to a few people I found a couple of books to start reading on my own and it kind of took off from there.

Some of my favorite authors in this genre that I have read are Donald Miller, David Nasser, Leonard Sweet, and David Crowder (he’s pretty famous in Christian circles but more for his music than his books). They always have interesting stories to tell. They always present their life experiences as a story and they hope you get something out of it. They all have a story to tell and they desperately want you to hear it.

Christian spirituality books are awesome and everything but there is another book that I try to read when I can…yeah. That’s the one. The Bible. As I was thinking about writing this piece, I thought to myself that maybe God is, in a manner of speaking, in the same boat as a lot of these authors. Here’s God and He’s got a story that He desperately wants to tell us.

When I look at the Bible, I like to look at it as a narrative. It’s not just a book of guidance and wisdom; it’s also a book of stories. It’s a book with stories about a guy taking down a giant with a slingshot, and about some dudes who got thrown into a furnace and survived. Oh yeah, and there was also the Guy Whose teachings and actions turned the world upside down. Then the same Guy changed the status quo by being crucified and then rising from the grave. Wow. But through all of the stories that are presented in the Bible there’s always this one God. It’s a narrative. It’s a story. It’s a story about one God gave His love to us, even though we always do things to prove that we don’t deserve it.

The people who wrote the books that composed the Bible wrote it because they had a story tell. They wanted to tell a story of a Father’s Love and how it permeates through our existence and is a necessary component if we are to live out our lives with purpose.

If I wrote my story out, I wonder if God’s love would permeate through its pages. I want to live life like that. When I die I want people to look at me in my casket and thinking about nothing else but the life I lived for God. I’ve got a long way to go if I want to get to that point.