Imagination, Storytelling and Ashley Madison

This world can be pretty dark sometimes.

It seems horrific news stories constantly bombard us. Murdered reporters, children washed ashore and trucks full of abandoned bodies stretch across our screens. The chaos is unavoidable.

I often wonder what I should do or where I should be in all this mess. But above all, I wonder where God is in all this mess.

Because it all seems so dystopian. Like we are living in an unreality. Like we are characters in Wonderland. Like none of this is real.

It all feels like fiction.

* * *

When I was young, I wrote short stories. Although I found it fun, they were never any good and it was always incredibly difficult for me. 

I think the reason they were terrible was because they weren't rooted in anything true. It was all made up, from the first word to the last. 

When I wrote those stories, I tried to create something out of nothing. I tried to form something that was out of something that wasn’t. It was like pulling light out of a black hole; when you try to take from nothingness, you end up getting sucked in. 

In short, my stories had no inspiration. 

It seems that my creativity has matured since I was ten, and my creations are more mature because of it. But it's been the idea of inspiration that has opened my mind the most. It had never struck me to pull from my own experience when creating a new character or a new world. 

You may think I'm silly for only recently realizing that, but it's true.

My fiction matured when I buried nuggets of reality in it.

* * *

Sometimes I like to think that we exist in the imagination of God. Like a bored little boy on a rainy afternoon, He just thought us up one day. The mountains, the sky, the birds, the Eiffel Tower, Africa, Abraham. It is all just a product of His imagination. How else would you explain a platypus? Or even a Donald Trump?

It is like we are His imaginary world, a magnificent work of fiction. Everything around us that we see and feel is an unreality, existing only in the mind of something that really is real. Like Narnia or Middle-Earth, the earth was formless and void once. Nothing was there because it hadn't been thought up yet. Then God said, "Let there be light."

This rings true to me. For whatever reason, God has seen fit that we should wade through this land of make believe in search of the edge of the world. Our lives are riddled with fictitious subplots in our ultimate pilgrimage to find something, or rather Someone, true. 

We are living in a cosmic story. And with no precedent that we know of, it would only make sense that the Storyteller write a fairytale.

We are fiction in the mind of God.

* * *

The recent headlines make more sense when I see them through this lens. 

This world is fiction. And sometimes a suspense thriller can get pretty chaotic before the resolution. Sometimes a man shoots another man, and sometimes people have affairs. After all, you can't have a fairytale without a wicked, old witch. 

But I think there is something better than hanging on for dear life until the end of this crazy book.

Because God is a good storyteller. His creation is inspired. 

He didn't pull light from a black hole to illuminate the world. He pulled from His own mouth. He did not think us up out of nothingness.  He thought us up out of Himself. He has drawn from His own character to make ours.

Through all of this chaos, amidst ISIS and Ashley Madison, we can see hints of inspiration shining through the dark. 

As if God imbedded Himself into His work, there is goodness to be soaked up all around. Because there is beauty in every bird. There is peace in a child's giggle. There is community in music. There is kindness in the man who helps fix your car when it's broken down on the side of the road. 

God has laced His fiction with truth. Andrew Peterson calls it, "windows in the world, a little glimpse of all the goodness getting through." These realities are signposts, rays of spoken light leading us into something more and more real.

So when the story has ended and God closes the book, the fiction will burn up in the unquenchable fire until only the truly inspired things of God remain.

"For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

"And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love."