I remember a conversation I had with my dad when I was eight or nine years old. We were sitting on our front porch in old wood rocking chairs. It’s an interesting memory for me because I have very few of the front porch; it wasn’t a common place for us to spend our time. But on this day it was just Dad and me on the front porch. I had been trying to find the courage to tell my dad something that I thought he would tell me was foolish or childish. On the front porch that day, I mustered up the courage to tell him something that I thought made me weird, something I would never have told my friends. I figured he could tell me how to stop, how to grow up.

“Dad, I feel like my life is a movie or a great story. I pretend. A lot. I pretend that I am the hero of my story and there are bad guys and good guys, and I fight for the good side, of course. Even at school or Cub Scouts or wherever, I’m pretending it is part of my adventure, my story, of which I am the star.”

I didn’t tell him anything about my thoughts of damsels in distress, or my deep fear of the enemy. I didn’t tell him everything. I told him a little and waited for him to reason with me. I waited for him to share logic with me to help me get out of my fairy tale.

Staring out into the field across from our house, never looking at me, my dad replied, “Yeah, me too.”

G.K. Chesterton said, “I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller.”1

My dad’s affirmation that day would grow into my belief today that I am indeed a part of a greater story, a story with good guys and bad guys, adventure and romance, intrigue and suspense.

I am a part of the God Story and you are too.

It can be easy to look at the Bible as a haphazard collection of sixty-six books from different eras, different regimes, and different authors, written with different intents.

It can equally be easy to see our fragmented lives as a haphazard collection of events with little to nothing holding it all together.

Neither one of these vantage points is accurate.

I believe your life changes when you see the threads that run through the great story of God’s people found in the Bible, and when you see your life as a continuation of that story.

If there is something in you that says where you are right now is not how the story is supposed to end...if your heart tells you there is something more to your life than the tasks on your to-do list, then I want to say to you today...

God is the author of the greatest story. God is the main character, but you have a role to play.

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excerpt from: The God Story Daily Readings by Jacob Armstrong. Copyright©2013 by Abingdon Press. Used with permission.

1. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Scotts Valley, CA: IAP, 2009), 39.