Journal entry- October 17, 2017
Who are you, God? And who am I?
“I am the Author, the Bookkeeper, the Main Character. You are the quill.”
The Author. He writes every story. He writes stories of redemption, of battles fought for life over death, of real encounters with love. He dreamed up the concept of stories. He created the idea of a book. He knew that people would one day read words on a page that flow together to inspire thought and create emotion. He knew that in order to write, He would need ink and a quill. But would the quill be willing to shape the ink to create a story? Would the quill want to write on its own? It tried a few times, realizing it couldn’t ever get the ink on the page quite clear enough to read. Instead the ink spilled into formless shapes without meaning. Sometimes, if the Author was writing a chapter the quill didn’t like, it would call out for another hand to grab hold and make it scratch different letters into the page. But the words the letters made, while legible, caused more confusion, pain, and fear. Suddenly the story lost direction and hope, so the quill had to let the original Author pick it back up and breathe life into the story again. Sometimes, the quill would catch a glimpse of another book. A book written by the same Author, but penned by a different quill. The quill feels its first flicker of jealousy. Why did the Author give the other book a better sounding title? Why didn’t the other book have the heavy words its own had, and why weren’t the pages filled with the same sad ink as it’s own pages were? The quill liked the adjectives, the plot, the style more, and suddenly wasn’t proud to write it’s own story. It simply gave up. Why write a story it didn’t want to write? But after days of lying still, having abandoned the purpose it was crafted for, it begged to be picked up, yet again. Having no purpose or use was far worse than writing stories, even if sometimes it didn’t like the tale it was telling. So the quill continues to trust the hand that’s holding it, and it realizes something. The main character in the story is the same character in every other book it’s ever read. The main character always meets someone new. That’s what every book is about. The main character will meet someone and ask their name, yet somehow he always knows before they say anything. The quill starts to love writing again. It loves to write words that bring hope and fill the reader with joy. It loves telling stories of pure love. It loves to tell the reader that they are loved. The more the author writes, the more it becomes clear that the main character is really talking to the quill. As the quill does what it was meant to, the main character says things that makes more and more sense. Everything falls into places and no matter what the Author asks the quill to write, the quill always says, “yes”, because it can’t wait to hear the end of the story.
The Author is not just a writer, He is also a bookkeeper. Weaving stories from different books together, He crafts a masterpiece. A series of books that all point to the main character and his character. His pure, steadfast, unchanging character that, at the end of every book, tells the reader how good the Author is. The Author, the Bookkeeper, holds everything together. Without His wisdom and thoughtfulness, the books would fall off the shelves, fall out of order. Without the bookkeeper there is no order. There is no meaning or clarity, because the stories make no sense out of order. The books are bound together by the bookkeeper, because He knows that they love to read the other stories. The stories love to read about the main character, the author, the bookkeeper.
One day, the Bookkeeper did something crazy. He knew that without writing a story all about the main character, the books would never fully understand Him and wouldn’t want to be used by only Him. The quills didn’t understand real love. So the Author made the quill that would tell the whole story of the main character. The whole story from start to finish. He wrote and wrote and never once did the quill complain. It never gave up. It never chose someone else to write the story. It never decided to write on its own. It let the Author write every word He needed to. See the main character is the Author in a story. The story was written so the books could understand. The books needed to know that the main character, the Author, was once in their shoes, being used to write a story, no matter how painful or tiring. Beyond that, the main character made a choice to become a quill. It knew that it had to be held, to be used to write, to bear the weight of the Author’s hand in order to be understood by the other quills. He chose to do this because only He knew how gentle the Author was, and he needed to show the others that he had felt the page and the the strain and still trusted the hand. The main character’s story is the best one of all. The book is filled with miracles. From mending quills to let them write again, to giving quills new ink, the main character’s quill did things that the other quills never dreamed about. The main character showed every other quill how to truly love the Author. When the Author wrote the chapter filled with the most pain, the most suffering, and the worst punishment that had ever been written, it left the quill broken. Because so many quills had chosen to leave the Author’s hand, He had to write out the words of sadness and grief, but the words were too heavy for any other quill to bear. The main character needed to engrave the heaviest pain and the hardest words into the page, so the other quills didn’t have to. When the quill shattered, all the books started to weep. They loved to read about the miracles, the other quills it met, and the friendships it made with them. The quill told the other books things that they needed to know in order to fulfill the whole reason they were created. So the books sobbed when the quill broke. Then the pages began to dry as the quill slowly pieced itself back together. The quills watched in amazement as the quill was made brand new. They watched as the Author grasped the quill in the hand that wrote the whole story. The main character told the others that they would never feel the pain of being broken. He told them that the Author was a safe hand to be held by and if they chose to remain in His fingers, they would never fall apart. The quills that hear this story find that it’s their favorite thing to write about, because the main character makes their story beautiful. The books that are written by quills who have met him are the best books to read and those who do read are always changed. The main character, the Author, the Bookkeeper, and the quill. Somehow He chose to pick me up.
