storylines...

I wrote this awhile ago but it feels like it belongs in this week...

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I've been thinking about life stories. How they are written... who writes them... Are the journeys of our lives predetermined for us? Or do our choices have more control over our destinies? What about the the things that happen to us that don't make any sense?

Have you ever done one of those creative writing games, where you each take turns adding one line to the story, then you pass it to the next person, so they can only see the one line written before? One person might start off writing a fairytale, and the next turns it into a mystery, and the next into a suspense novel... And the cleverest of all can take a story almost at a dead ending and with a few words bring it back to a whole new beginning again.

Maybe our life stories go something like that. Maybe there are a certain number of lines already written for us, from the beginning of time... Then there are a certain number of lines that we write ourselves... and a certain number of lines written by the people we choose to add to our lives... but there are also a certain amount of lines allowed to be written by other people that we don't necessarily have any control over.

Maybe it's the order of those lines that God can see, and rearrange, and supersede. And maybe, although he doesn't erase and doesn't delete the lines that have already been laid, if we only let him, he can write in between the lines, changing the meaning entirely.

Maybe things like the choice of where I live next is one of the lines I write myself. Maybe the man I will marry is one of the lines already written that hasn't been added to the story yet. And maybe what's amazing is that no matter what enters into my story, I can always trust God to bring me to the perfect ending.

Maybe it's more than maybe.

:: "We will not know unless we begin." –Peter Nivio Zarlenga