Storyfeast.org

Waiting for Godot, an existentialist play by Samuel Beckett, tells the story of two men sitting on a park bench, waiting for “Godot” to show up. In the play, Godot (whose name clearly represents God) never arrives, though several odd messengers do. Written after World War II, this play represents the questions many held about the meaning of life in that harsh era.

The Bible is full of stories of waiting, expectation, and hope. It tells a true Story in which Christ has lived, died, and been raised from the dead. In those acts of existence, Christ has begun a new kingdom. And yet, we are left to live well as we wait in hope for the day Christ returns to bring new Creation to its fulfillment.

How about you? Have you ever felt like you are going through the motions of daily life, wondering if there is any meaning? Have you ever waited for someone or something really important to come into your life or to change in your life? Think of a story in which you waited for something. How was your expectation fulfilled (or not fulfilled)? Did fruition come in the time or manner you wished? Did you ever attempt to make the reality happen through your own plan (read Genesis 16 for a prime example of this way of dealing with waiting☺!) What questions about God did you have as you waited? Read the following Scriptures to help you as you think about your stories of wait: Psalm 62, 37, 40, Habakkuk 2:3…the WHOLE BIBLE☺!

Write it down. Share it. For those of you who live near me, we will be having a Story Feast Tuesday night at 7 p.m. at my house. Bring some appetizer or dessert to share and a story. Even if you don’t have a story or haven’t written it down, come and listen to others’ stories. You will leave well-fed on the hope we have in God!
www.livingstorygrace.com

“What do I do?”

This barely audible question came through the phone line along with my 19 year old son’s deep sobs as he mourned the loss of a dear friend.  Seven hundred miles away on a diving vacation with his grandfather, Kirby had been given the news that one of his closest friends had been killed in a car accident the night before.

My mind raced to come up with the perfect mom’s answer to his question, but I realized I had no clue what he was asking.  I didn’t think he really wanted me to say, “Well, you get on the plane and come home and prepare for the funeral.”  I decided what he was really asking was “What do I believe?”  Indeed, while my mind was searching, he coughed out the words, “This wasn’t supposed to happen.  He was getting better.”  (His friend had died in the hospital several hours after the accident.)  What Kirby was really asking was, “What do I do with God when this kind of pain comes?  How do I make sense of who God is?”

That is the question, isn’t it?  Moments of tragedy and minutes of trial drive us to ask the question.  We ask it frequently, if not overtly; we speak it through our tantrums of frustration and our tears of deep loss, through our sighs of hope and our sighs of resignation.   And God answers the question, well, no, not in the way we would want,  with a clear rational explanation of why babies are abused or why we lost our job…God gives us a story.  It is the story of grace, the gospel, that tells us that God suffered the deepest suffering to bring new life out of death and suffering.  This story tells us that we are moving toward a day when there will be no more untimely (or timely) death, no more tears of mothers mourning lost sons, no more missing friends who announced their arrival at the house by blowing the train horn they had affixed to their truck.  This story gives us a context for answering the question, “What do I do?”

Alasdaire MacIntyre says, “I can only answer the question, ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story do I find myself a part?’  As a Mom, I realized I didn’t have any satisfactory answer to offer Kirby.  I said things like, “You do just what you’re doing.  Cry and wail and rail at the senseless loss.  Come home and let us hold you and pray with you.  Put one foot in front of the other.”  They weren’t bad answers, but they weren’t the best answer.  The best answer is, “Remember the Story of which you are a part, and lean into it.”  It is the answer that must have supplied him with the courage he has needed for these days:  calling the third of their three musketeers to give him the hard news; putting together a playlist of his friend’s country favorites; attending the first visitation and funeral of his life that really mattered to him.  I received a text from him last night after the visitation.  It said, “That was the most painful, yet the most meaningful and encouraging thing I have ever done.”  Kirby knows what to do, and he is doing it.  He is moving into the pain with the hope of the Story he knows to be true.  May we all remember the Story of which we are a part, the one that shows us what to do – to live and love well because He has first loved us.

“Learning, living, and learning in God’s story of grace.“  This is the tagline for the new creation Living Story, LLC. (www.livingstorygrace.com)

Redeemed Hearts Ministries is becoming Living Story, which will offer gospel-charged workshops and retreats, excellent materials and resources, and compassionate consulting and coaching.  My passion continues to be bringing the powerful and life-changing hope of the gospel to broken and hurting people.  The shift is primarily in a call to move outward with this great story of good news that calls us to live in freedom because we have been freed!

Let me go back to the tagline to explain the focus of Living Story:

1)  Learning in God’s story of grace — this little preposition makes the tagline a bit awkward, but it is essential.  Here’s why:  I want people to “learn” God’s story of grace, to know the TRUE story Scripture tells about who God is and how He created us and the difference that makes in our lives.  I want them to know how the Fall shows us why life doesn’t work the way we want it to, and to know how Christ’s redemption restores us to make us restorers of a broken world.  But here’s the problem:  we can learn that in our heads without ever living it in our hearts.  The best kind of learning comes when we learn IN God’s story of grace, when we surrender our hearts to what we are learning.

2)Living in God’s story of grace.  Well, the bottom line is we are living in God’s story of grace, whether we know it or not, or whether it feels like it or not.  When we begin to look at our stories, we see that God has engraved grace across every moment of our lives, even when we didn’t see it.  We don’t really live grace unless we live in grace.  Living means acting on and applying what we’ve learned, and it requires a response of repentance to what we’ve learned.

3)  Loving in God’s story of grace.  The preposition is particularly important in this aspect of our change.  Many times we don’t love God’s story of grace.  The fact is, God’s grace often feels painful, sometimes hateful.  We may resist it or run from it, but because God pursues us with His grace, we ultimately cannot escape it.  And when we are captured by grace, we begin to love — the poor, the marginalized, our neighbors, and our enemies.  We begin to live lives of forgiveness, both forgiving and being forgiven, and our hearts overflow with grace and mercy for others.  We can’t wait to tell the good news of how God has freed us from heart paralysis.  This is what it means to love in God’s story of grace.

More to come in the following days about Living Story.  I will continue to keep my blog here and a page for you to tell your stories.  Stay tuned and check out Living Story (www.livingstorygrace.com).