Six months. It doesn’t seem like a long time. It’s only half of a year. Five percent of a decade. It goes by instantly and slow all the same. But what happens when you do something for six months is that it slowly becomes just your life. And in just our life, we miss things.
It slowly doesn’t strike us that that child is running around naked and muddy. We don’t take a second glance at the mountain of trash on the street that people are digging through to find glass or plastic that they might be able to get pennies for.
The Race becomes less National Geographic and more Business Weekly. It’s just another child orphaned by AIDS. It’s just another jobless mother trying to provide for her family. And just like in our “normal” lives, we lose sight of our purpose. We lose sight of what our lives are supposed to be. We forget that with Jesus at the center, the author of life (Acts 3:15 ), our lives are supposed to be lived to the full and to the overflowing.
Sometimes I wonder if characters in books wake up and don’t want to live the story anymore. What if the protagonist decided they didn’t want to be the coming-of-age hero anymore? Or what if the antagonist woke up and just decided not to be evil anymore? What if Voldemort, after having his morning coffee, decided he was sorry for everything he had done and he should go turn himself in at Azkaban?
Because sometimes I, as the character in a story that has nothing to do with me, will look up into the heavens at the author of life and want to say, “No.” Sometimes I wake up and don’t want to hug that child who was abused and abandoned. Sometimes I don’t want to lead a team of women or speak into their lives. And I sure as hell don’t want them to speak into mine some days.
And then I remember every other time I’ve decided not to choose His story. The days I haven’t chosen Christ. The days when I let words go unsaid. The days when everything I saw was just ordinary and so full of monotonous, monochromatic gray. These days resemble my life six months ago.
The months of my life before The Race were filled with things I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see the beautiful details of my setting or the mysteries of the foreshadowing and symbolism in my story because I was refusing to understand the plot being written for me. It was just another day at the library, just another day at church, just another grocery run. And while I loved that life, I kept looking for the climax.
And here I am, six months into the year that I thought would be just that (the climax) and I’m…bored. And with boredom comes frustration because I always do this. I get bored of one job, man, song, life and I choose another. Where did the purpose go? Why is everything in gray scale again? Its not the author’s fault. He’s still writing the greatest epic ever to be written.
I could go home and choose my old setting or choose a new one. Or I could trust that the plot before me is good. I could trust that this is the setting I’m supposed to be in. I could choose to believe that that child with eyes like butterscotch isn’t an extra or a static character.
She’s a main character in the same story as mine. And that single mother is one of many heroines. And that drunk man is a character displaying potential redemption. Redemption being the greatest plot twist of them all.
I could believe that God took Africa and slid His finger right on the saturation scale until the colors hurt your eyes. Because they do. And that doesn’t make this setting anymore beautiful than yours or the one I was in six months ago. It just makes it different.
And if we allow ourselves to trust the author of our story and to understand that our story isn’t about us, then our lives can be lived more fully. More vivedly. More purposefully.
I guarantee the story He writes for you will be a bestseller.
I know mine will be.
