Where Are We?
In every life there is a lower story and an upper story.
The lower story essentially has each of us as our own protagonist. This makes sense. It is how our brains work. And they work this way because we, of all living species on this planet take longest to grow up. Again, it’s a brain thing. We are thinkers in ways other species don’t think.
The upper story is a bigger narrative. Some want it to be a them-against-us story where our people are the heroes. These are cultural or national myths — stories that attempt to explain who we are and where we came from in a way pleasing to its particular audience.
There is a bigger more inclusive upper story and that is the biblical narrative or worldview.
On the surface it might seem to be about a particular race, but the more anyone reads the more obvious it becomes that they are not the heroes even of their own part in the story.
In fact one of the strongest proofs in my mind of the true nature of this millennium-long compiled narrative is that it does not appear to cut any character more slack than he or she deserved.
Weaknesses and flaws are not glossed over.
This is because the overarching story is not about man but God — and not just a mythical god like Zeus, who is all powerful but not particularly bright, but a God with both a real personality, one who loves and hates, and universe-creating power.
What the God of the Bible loves and hates are the deeper questions we should seek to understand well before deciding how we each should relate to him.
Which brings me back around to our lower stories.
If the upper story exists and is the truest way to see the world including our own lives then it makes sense to want to understand how we fit in.
With this in mind we seem to have been given a choice in the middle of many things we did not choose.
We didn’t choose where, when, and to whom we would be born. We didn’t choose our brains and bodies.
What we have been given is a choice to follow God or go our own ways.
This reason alone should compel every thinking person to want to study the Bible because it contains a lot of lower stories filled with people who have gone before us who have made all sorts of decisions.
From learning about their successes and failures we at least have the opportunity to make our own informed decisions.
All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
2 Timothy 3:16-17 (ESV)
