Just Like You Wrote It or NOT Living The Dream? - Joyfully Pressing On
Like You Wrote It?
It didn’t sit right.
That America’s funny, wholesome family man- The Cosby Show was one of 3 sitcoms mom let us watch- would say something like that didn’t fit. It sounded smug, arrogant, proud.
I won’t comment on Bill Cosby’s fall from grace and imprisonment, except to say, It’s all so sad.
But Cosby’s comment does make more sense now.
These are not the exact words I heard on the TV interview two decades ago, but these are attributable, and they’re close. When asked about married life, Cosby said with that big easy grin of his,
We are living it now just like we wrote it.
It hit me wrong. Because even then, fresh out of grad school, newly married in my early 20’s, with a house and a job and good friends, I may have been living somebody’s dream, but I knew I wasn’t living mine
My story had already taken some twists and turns I couldn’t have imagined, much less written 20 years ago. Let’s just say, I didn’t think I’d be playing these roles, with the “cast” now. I’m not (mostly) living my dreams. This isn’t how I wrote the story.
Which is really no matter.
Playing The Part
Because, my life is not really my show.
C.S. Lewis explained like this: We do not know the play. We do not even know whether we are in Act I or Act V. We do not know who are the major and who the minor characters. The Author knows. We are led to expect that the Author will have something to say to each of us on the part that each of us has played.
The playing it well is what matters infinitely.
God wrote us each into this story, where He wanted us. He’s the Author of our salvation (Hebrews 12:2) and the Director of our hearts (2 Thessalonians 3:5). And He casts each of us in his grand play to the praise of his glory (1 Corinthians 7:17).
And when we are on our set stages- and in our waiting stages- playing our roles with joy and thanks, we make Him look great.
Testify to Grace
Paul said something 2,000 years ago that ties all this story-play-dream stuff together for me.
In Acts 20 Paul shares some sobering last words with some old friends, church leaders from Ephesus. He explain that he will go to Jerusalem, not knowing what will happen to him there.
In other words, Paul didn’t know what turns his story will take. No worries, though, because not knowing the story didn’t stop him from playing his part well. Heres’s how he summed up that part (Acts 20:24):
But I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God.
Is that the aim of our lives too?
Different Stories, Same Aim
Our stories are so different. But, John Piper explains, in Christ,
We do all have the same essential goal: to magnify the glory and the greatness of the grace of God in Jesus Christ. This is the racecourse all Christians are running. The turns and the terrain are different. The aim is the same.
This means we embrace the fact that we do not write our own stories. We don’t know the next page, let alone the next chapter. The way there is unknown.
Our stories twist and turn,
[A]round the corner called future and disappears into the unknown. Therefore, the unwasted life is always lived one step from the unknown. This is what faith is for. “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going” (Hebrews 11:8). That’s what faith does.
I don’t want to waste my life. Which means I need to rest content with the unknown next chapters and with parts I wouldn’t have scripted this way.
Not Living the Dream is Still Alright With Me
So, no. I wouldn’t have written myself in this way- not into this marriage or this job, not these boys, this house, or this blog. (Well, I guess I do write the blog. But it wasn’t my dream. My friend Traci spurred it on.)
But I do know this story I’m in, with both its surprise twists and its storylines that feel more static than I’d write, was scripted by God.
And- oft in sorrow, oft in woe– often way too slowly both for the characters around me and for me- I’m learning that it’s not so much what part I play but how I play that part that matters.
Oh, sure, sometimes I let my hungry eyes drift to what seem like others’ storybook lives and dream up different parts for me. But my aim is to play my part well, which is to testify to the grace of God.
And the great thing is, I don’t have to have to be living like I wrote it, living the dream, to do that.
In fact, God’s grace might just look that much greater when the testimony to it comes from one whose story is not just like he wrote it.
I know, O LORD, that the way of man is not in himself, that it is not in man who walks to direct his steps.
Jeremiah 10:23
