A Perfect Story… With a Few Imperfections

Since reading Don Miller’s book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, I’ve continued to reference life as a story.  It makes sense.  Everyone loves a good story, why wouldn’t we desire to live one?

Over the last few months I’ve started this little project, I write/talk to all sorts of people about what it means to be human.  Friends, family, strangers, and many of my friends from camp.  It has been the single most rewarding thing I have taken on, partly because in my own story I feel that this idea of “being human” will play a very important part of where I go and what I end up doing.

So after collecting my letters and going through my notes of conversations, I have decided that (actually it was most of the people that I have talked with) an important part about being human is being imperfect.  Or more importantly, how we react or respond to our imperfectness expresses our beliefs about being human. 

The truth is, we are imperfect.  We struggle with sin, we will disappoint someone, somewhere, at some time in our life, probably on multiple occasions.   Good thing the gospel reminds us that we are imperfect, finite people that God still wants to use us for His better story.  Thank the Lord for the witness of Paul, a person who was responsible for the mass murder of Christians in the early Church, yet after His encounter with Christ he became one of the greatest ambassadors for His glory.  And the Disciples, people just like you and me… imperfect…  yet when asked to surrender everything, they said yes.  When asked to be a part of a better story, they said yes.

Friends, our story is not about being perfect, we must be made perfect.  It is about knowing we are imperfect and being used for God’s perfect story.  Still, we have decisions to make, and at times we may make the wrong one; but thankfully we have a loving Father who so desperately wants to make us perfect, through Him.  I wish I could say that our journeys towards better stories will be easy.  At times it may be, but there will be many times that we are opposed because of the perfect story that has been set on our heart. 

If anything, our imperfectness should remind us of how desperately we need grace and how much we must depend on God.  We need to know that we are imperfect so that through us we can better demonstrate Love.  We need to understand that we are not capable of much without Him, but if we will let Him, He will use us to do great things. 

So understand that being imperfect does not mean that we are not useful, or that we are not capable of doing great good.  If our story includes the grace of Christ, we are capable of doing even bigger things than we could have ever imagined. 

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them.  And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.  We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.  We implore you on Christ’s behalf:  Be reconciled to God.  God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

II Corinthians 5:17-21

Live a Better Story.

I love Donald Miller.  The first book of his I read, Blue Like Jazz, was the first book that challenged me to understand faith as my own.  As much as I loved that book, it has taken me over four years to pick up another of his works, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.  Sure enough, I came across this book while looking for another book by a different author.

God has a way with “perfect timing”.  I’ve wanted to read this book for awhile, but I don’t think I was ready for it until now.  These last few months God has occupied much of my thoughts with questions about life’s purpose and meaning, both for myself and for others.  Ironically, this is what Miller is writing about... at least that is what I believe I am reading about. 

Life (being human, purpose, meaning, whatever you want to call it) is very much like a story, it is our story.  Do we truly want our story to be simply about our pursuit of comfortable living?  Do we want our story to be simple at all?  I don’t. 

That’s where Miller’s challenge comes in.  Live a better story.  You and I, whether you believe our lives to be spoken into existence by God or not, have been given control of our own story.  The pages to our future are unwritten.  They are not written for me, and they are not written for you either.  You and I have the opportunity to write our futures, to write successes and failures, adventures and misadventures.  Or, we can write a simple story, of avoiding conflict, playing it safe, taking care of ourselves, not risking anything.  We can write a boring story, if that is what we want. 

Even though we have been called into existence for a purpose, our future is our own.  However, "writing" our story should still include learning to trust and depend fully on God’s plan for us, which I hardly doubt is a simple, comfortable, and meaningless life.  Still, He has created us for a purpose and given us the opportunity to live for something greater, live for something other than ourselves, live in faith.  This is the exciting part about being human, having the ability to make our own decisions, step out in faith, and live out the adventure that God has purposed us for.

So here is my question to you (and me).  When someone else tells our story, what will they say?  Will it be about comfortable living, free from risk?  Or will it be about struggle, conflict, and adventure?  Do you believe that God has written us into existence so that we can live comfortably, or for something more?  How will we live a better story?

Psalm 139:16

“All the days ordained for me

were written in your book

before one of them came to be.”