"Story"

My dear friend, Angie, sent me the book "A million miles in a thousand years" by Donald Miller. I've gotta say, I'm only half way through it (yes, I am a slow reader and I feel like it takes me an unusually long time to finish a book)... BUT, I love it so far! The gist of the book is to write a good story for your life. Sounds simple enough, but truthfully I think we (society as a whole), cheat ourselves from amazing life stories out of fear. We would rather live the predictable, comfortable, life- then let go of control and live the story God desperately wants to write for us.

Donald Miller talks about how "there is a writer outside ourselves, plotting a better story for us", but how we so often try to play out the scene in the way we want. One of my favorite things he says is this, " I like the part of the Bible that talks about God speaking the world into existence, as though everything we see and feel were sentences from this mouth, all the wet of the world his spit. I feel written. My skin feels written, and my desires feel written. My sexuality was a word spoken by God, that I would be male, and I would have brown hair and brown eyes and come from a womb. It feels literary, doesn't it, as if we are characters in books."

I feel like since Joshua and I embarked on this crazy journey of saying YES to adoption- that the concept of "story" has been all around us. And it's become blatantly clear that someone other then ourselves is doing the writing for our lives! There is something incredibly freeing about letting go of the pen, and just saying, "God, write away!". And it's true, He writes much better then I do, my stories stink and always have predictable outcomes! His however, have endings that can only be contributed to Him because they're so amazing! I LOVE this story He's writing for our family right now!

So I say this to remind myself and as a challenge to whoever is reading this ... Listen to your writer!

Here are two verses that we keep coming back to over and over again:

Proverbs 24:12 "Once our eyes are opened, we can't pretend we don't know what to do. God, who weighs our hearts & keeps our souls, knows that we know, and hold us responsible to act."

Isaiah 30:21 "Whether you turn to the right or the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, "This is the way, walk in it."

I think if Christians were to live a little more like this, it would mean we were letting God do the writing for our live:

RADICAL from David Platt on Vimeo.