Friday, July 21, 2006

What movie is this?

Yesterday I tried to blog on what I've been feeling lately and I couldn't get my words to work for me. Everything I wrote seemed to be a jumbled up mess. I ended up scrapping the whole post. Well, today I read part of the book called Epic by John Eldredge. These two pages explain perfectly what I've been feeling lately.

"Here's where we run into a problem. For most of us, life feels like a movie we've arrived at forty-five minutes late.
Something important seems to be going on...Maybe. I mean, good things do happen, sometimes beautiful things. You meet someone, fall in love. You find that work that is yours alone to fulfill. But tragic things happen too. You fall out of love, or perhaps the other person falls out of love with you. Work begins to feel like a punishment. Everything starts to feel like an endless routine.
If there is meaning to this life, then why do our days seem so random? What is this drama we've been dropped into the middle of? If there is a God, what sort of story is he telling here? At some point we begin to wonder if Macbeth wasn't right after all: Is life a tale "told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?"
No wonder we keep losing heart.
We find ourselves in the middle of a story that is sometimes wonderful, sometimes awful, often a confusing mixture of both and we haven't a clue how to make sense of it all. It's like we're holding in our hands some pages out of a torn book. These pages are the days of our lives. Fragments of a story. They seem important, or at least we long to know they are, but what does it all mean? If only we could find the book that contains the rest of the story.
Chesterton had it right when he said, "With every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand".
Walk into any large mall, museum, amusement park, university, or hospital and you will typically meet at once a very large map with the famous red star and the encouraging words YOU ARE HERE. These maps are offered to visitors as ways to orient themselves to their situation, get some perspective on things. This is the Big Picture. Hopefully you now know where to go. You have your bearings.
Oh, that we had something like this for our lives.
"This is the Story in which you have found yourself. Here is how it got started. Here is where it went wrong. Here is what will happen next. Now this-this is the role you've been given. If you want to fulfill your destiny, this is what you must do. These are the cues. And here is how things are going to turn out in the end".
We can.
We can discover the Story. Maybe not with perfect clarity, maybe not in the detail that you would like, but in greater clarity than most of us now have, and that would be worth the price of admission. I mean, to have some clarity would be gold right now.
Wouldn't it?"


Gold...Yes it would be.

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