“Worlds discovered and ones not yet explored. Happiness, love, revenge, despair, mercy, compassion…life. Too many to count and not enough hours to read them all. Crisp bindings or worn pages. Books. With every page a telling of a story whether true or imagined. Sometimes I get so lost in the narrative of a book that I can’t hear. I’m engulfed in another world, another story. Yet the pages we read aren’t the only ones telling a tale. We are in the middle of a grand story. Our own lives. The lives of others. What are you putting on your pages? What are you putting on the pages of others?”
~ Miss Elainious blog, Day 83
I read this awhile ago and thought it was so well-put and thought-provoking. It expresses so eloquently some of the same thoughts that I have had about books and stories, with a challenging twist added in – what are you putting on the pages of your story?
The idea that each of us is writing our own story- action by action, choice by choice, thought by thought- is a sobering one. It gives the little everyday words, thoughts, and actions that we don’t give much thought to a permanence that we don’t often attribute to such things. But if every action and reaction of ours was written down for posterity, what kind of story would each of us be telling with our lives? A selfish one? A compassionate one? An angry one? A kind one? How do we treat others? Are we contributing to the chapters of struggle and frustration in their lives, or to the chapters of blessing and joy?
It’s interesting to think about the amount of control we have over what ends up on the pages of our story and the strange fact that we are both a character in and the author of our story. There are certain parts of our story that we have no control over, such as how it begins as well as the other characters and plot twists that occur. But, strange though it may seem, the part of our story that we have the most control over is one that seems the least likely to lie within our powers of choice: the ending.
You may or may not be familiar with the “Choose Your Own Ending” books – stories that have multiple plot twist options along the way that lead you to many different endings, depending on which combination of choices you make along the way. If you don’t like the ending you arrived at, you can just go back and choose a different option earlier in the story and see where that one takes you. You choose how the story ends.Unfortunately, we can’t turn back the pages of life and edit them- once they are written, they are written forever and may only be reviewed in memory. Choices that we wish we hadn’t made cannot be undone.
But we do have a choice as to how our story ends; two choices, actually. One is eternal life with Christ in heaven and the other is eternal torment in hell. But once you get to the ending, you can’t go back and change it if you don’t like it. That choice is made earlier in the story, when you find out that Christ died in your place on the cross to pay the price for your sins. If you make the choice to believe that He is the Son of God – the Savior- and that God raised Him from the dead, your story – or rather, this early preface to all eternity that each one of us is in right now – will end in eternal paradise in Heaven, and will make the rest of your story here on earth more joyful, peaceful, and wonderful than anything you could imagine. The other ending choice is to reject Christ as your Savior and God’s open invitation to enter into a personal relationship with His. This means you choose to spend eternity separated from God in hell – a very real place with very real agony. That’s not God’s ending of choice for anyone’s story- He doesn’t want anyone to go there, but rather He wants everyone to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2:3). But for some reason, He places the power to choose our own ending in our own hands. Which will you choose? Happily Ever After or Tragedy Ever After?
It’s your story.
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