The Perfect Story
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.” Proverbs 3:5
Whether it’s Council Fire, Vespers, or Banquet, we all love good stories, those that inspire and delight and challenge. They make us laugh, cry, and think. But no good story is possible without an even better author. The tale flows out of the author, and the reader is just along for the ride.
When you’re reading a book, you have no way of knowing what’s going to happen; you just trust that the author knows what’s best for the characters. All you can do is just keep on reading.
Though we may not realize it most of the time, you and I are in the midst of the most beautiful, incredible story in all of history, written by the greatest Author imaginable. It’s chock full of grace and redemption and sacrifice, but it’s much harder to trust this Author than those of the storybooks.
All across the Bible, God sets standards for His people to live by which set apart Christians’ lives from others. We’re told to love our neighbors, never put anything before God, honor our parents, tithe, read the Bible, and more. If you don’t know the Author, it just seems like an arbitrary set of rules, made for the sole purpose of controlling us and taking away our fun.
But the story is far more beautiful than that. Our Author does not leave us alone when we fail Him; instead, He ceaselessly runs after us to bring us back into His perfect story. He has proven Himself over and over to be faithful and loving and good, after all, He wrote Himself into the story.
He subjugated His son to more pain and rejection than any human will ever face, all so that you and I will never have to. That’s the kind of author you can trust. We can trust that the ways He calls us to live are not to squash our fun, but to make our lives fuller and richer, to protect us. After all, wouldn’t the Creator know how His creation functions best?
Everyone lives according to a story, be it their own or that of the Bible. The difference in the Christian story is that you don’t have to earn your way through it, and you don’t have to be perfect. We can rest in the truth that Jesus was righteous in our place, that in Him we are healed and whole.
We can stop trying to save ourselves. We can allow God to be God and ourselves to be human. We can rest in His understanding and not our own, trusting the Author and reading along. Knowing the Author frees us from having to know the why – it’s enough just to know that He’s weaving even our missteps back into His greater narrative. He writes us into His story and makes us beautiful, redeemed, and new. That kind of Author is worth following along.