Story of Your Life

I love to write stories. When I was 14 I began a medieval story about the Backstreet Boys and a princess named Jennie... there were My Little Ponies in this story, a magical wizard that blew a hole in a castle, and a dragon named Brittanie Speare who tried to take over the whole world.

Over the years there have been many other stories in my brain, not quite as ridiculous as that.  Max the toy bean stuffed horse... I left him in the shopping aisle at Toymart, somewhere in chapter 2, along with his red ball of a side kick, Flat, as they battled an evil brigade of shopping carts. There was also the story of Christie, who, after growing tired of her Stepford perfect, 1950's life, realizes that she is actually a storybook character and decides to escape her book.

I would fall asleep at night walking around the plot of my story. Visiting my characters, talking with them, sitting back and watching them fight or fall in love or fall off cliffs... mostly the latter. Like all my stories in my head, the characters grew so real to me that they seemed part of my actual life.

When I grew to the wise age of 18 the Backstreet Boy story morphed into a real place in Liverpool, England. The troubled, jaded heroine of the story, red haired, blue eyed Jennie Olivander fought through the struggles of a broken family. Then enters her life the rugged, loyal hero of the story, Luke O'Connor. This tall, dark haired, green eyed young man from Scotland helped her through her trials and they fell in love, living happily ever after.

Actually, this story is rather weird because I did end up meeting a person who eerily fit the description of my hero later in life. Our story, I am grieved to say, ended much differently than the fictitious version I dreamed up so long ago in my teenage years. But I still shudder sometimes thinking how close my real life touched the realm of Imagination...what are the odds of that, eh?

I think, some days, I prefer my imaginary world, over the real world. Yes, people die, people are hurt, people are eaten by dragons in stories... but there always seems an orderly point to it, a nobility of purpose. Real life is just messy, confusing, and painful. In life you can't count on foreshadowing to give you hints of the ending of something. You can't depend on hidden symbols, or motifs, or themes to make sense of why things are happening. Life just doesn't follow a pattern. And sometimes real life dragons will eat your best friends. Sometimes the ending isn't happy at all. Sometimes the handsome knight will enchant your heart only to decide that you aren't what he wants after all... and he leaves you trapped in your tower because he'd much rather go rescue a prettier princess, in a different castle. And when life strikes such blows, you are left with the broken, bloody pieces of your heart, trying to understand how it is possible to hurt as badly as this.

But then you begin to remember all the things you've forgotten. What it feels like to be free. The dance of joy in your heart when you see how it begins to heal. And on nights that are the blackest, the stars always shine stronger and truer than before. You remember all the chapters you've marched through, all the foes you've defeated, all the little battles in your life that have chiseled and cut and crafted you into a golden piece of refined beauty.  And yes, the Prince Charming may in the end turn out to be the villain, and there may not be a defined ending or a neatly summarized epilogue, but believe me when I say you are living a story. The most incredible story in world, if you chose to view it as such.

It makes you wonder, if the characters in the great stories ever felt as if their own world was as hopeless and messy as yours. And would they, if offered the chance, have given up if they had not been fighting for something stronger, nobler, and bigger than themselves? And like us, they too couldn't see the end, but they fought on, believing firmly that when the final page came it would be worth all the tears and all the miles of pages they toiled through.

And that is how I like to view life. An amazing, beautiful, sometimes tragic, sometimes phenomenal,  fantastic, original, adventurous tale of how you spend your days here upon the earth. You hold the pen. You have the choice. You decide how to write the story of your life! And always remember, as Christians, we have a "happily ever after" waiting upon our final page!