Quite often I say that my life is like a movie. The things that have happened to me and around me are hard to believe and often amusingly thrilling to hear about. Since being on the race, God has shown me that my life is more like a book than a movie. Actually, not just mine, but Christians in general.
Imagine God as the spine of the book, the thing that holds all of life’s pages together. No matter how torn up, marked on, or dog-eared the pages are, the spine of the book still holds them in place. The words on the pages are events, feelings, circumstances, stories, leaps, successes, and failures. The words make up who we are in this world. The sentences belong to the book, and therefore belong to the spine.
As the sentences scuttle across the page, we, as the words on the page, get further away from the spine and then come back to it, back to Him. Our lives are a series of sentences, of events, that venture to and from God. At the beginning of our book, our words are surface level, broad, introductory, simple. As the story goes on, it gets more complex, more detailed, and we become more invested. As we learn and grow, as we are challenged and as we experience the trials life has to offer us, we will continue to go through seasons and depths with our Father.
Sometimes we run from God, quickly going from one side of the page to another. We get to the end of the line and realize how far we have gone away from him. Luckily, His grace and mercy gives us a new line. A new beginning as close to the spine as the previous sentence. New.
Sometimes we crawl across that page, coasting, maybe not even realizing that we are crawling away from Him. These are the slow, uneventful parts of life; nothing extravagant, nothing disastrous. But if we aren’t walking in the direction of Christ, we are walking away from Him. Even still, His mercies are new every day, every line. Thank you, Jesus.
A lot of times my sin, anxiety, and eagerness to know what’s next pull me through pages too quickly. I spend more time trying to get to the next page rather than looking at what He is doing in my story right now.
How would it be if we could just stay as that first word, on that first page, in the first sentence? As close to the spine as possible? But what kind of story would that be? What kind of testimony to His glory would that one-word life offer?
This life is a testimony to Him. My book is His. Every word, every sentence, every line. I’ll forever and ever be tempted by sin and the brokenness of this world, but my God, my spine, is still holding me together at the end of the day.
We are in Ethiopia! Here’s to Africa and all it has in store for C-Squad!
