What You Don't See Coming
The movie Stranger Than Fiction starts with an unassuming Harold Crick (played by Will Farrell) brushing his 32 teeth 76 times (38 times up and down, 38 times side to side). He then uses a single windsor knot for his neck tie instead of a double (which saves him approximately 43 seconds per day). We know all of this because it's being narrated as he does it - and that leads to something interesting. The very fact that we hear a narrator's voice describing these otherwise ordinary things makes us ask at least two questions: (1) Why is this story being told? and (2) What does he not see coming?, and we assume that something is about to happen which will make us look back on the fact that he started his day counting brush strokes as being somehow ironic.That's what the voice of a narrator does: it makes us assume that this is a story worth telling because of what the characters don't see coming. I wonder if there is a way you can apply some part of that to your life? How would it change the way you look at your life as it is right now if you carried those two assumptions with you (That (1) you are in a story worth telling because of (2) something you don't see coming)?
Of course a lot of this has to do with who (or what) you've got in your 'God spot'. Do you believe in the kind of God that has made some kinds of people that are in a story worth telling and some kinds of people that are not? Do you believe it's decided largely by chance or circumstance? Do you believe that God even ever made anyone who could afford to have 'days of low possibility' (or days spent counting brush strokes)? Or did God only ever make one kind of person - a person who is living in a story worth telling because of what they don't see coming? Obviously I'd like to suggest the latter to you as something deeply worth considering.
I'd love to challenge you about making decisions from a deeper place this Sunday. Join us at Westside or tune into the podcast through the week.
Have a great weekend,
Chris
posted by Leigh at
3:07 PM
1 Comments:
I am glad that an experience in Africa can awaken the realisation that we are all ones brothers, sisters, sons and daughters. That the Africa narrative has the power to move us and provide us with a chance to find ourselves… yet why is it so hard to hold on to that experience at home? Why is it so difficult to treat our immediate neighbours and love ones as well as we can treat strangers? Is the difference the kind of need, one more obvious then the other, one easer in a way to deal with then the other? Is the difference distance? Away from home, unencumbered by our “lives” we allow ourselves to live in the moment, to be present in the sincere desire, to be ‘there’, to make a difference be a difference, to become the persons we hope we could be? At home... at home our life happens; living tomorrow today, constantly preparing for what might come next and our neighbour’s children well they don’t inspire us to the realisation that they are all our children.
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