In college, my roommates and i used to watch classic, timeless movies. And by “classic and timeless,” I mean Arnold Schwarzenegger shoot-em-up action flicks. There was zero character development, and the plot was always pretty basic: bad guy/alien makes Arnold mad, Arnold (usually with a small team) goes after bad guy/alien. Lots of things explode, and Arnold ultimately kills bad guy/alien and there’s a happy ending.
That is, unless you’re on Arnold’s team. Tough luck there. There’s only room for one hero, and unless you’re Danny Devito, sidekicks in Schwarzenegger movies are typically collateral damage.
On the other end of the “classic and timeless” spectrum from Arnold is Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The famously-long novel has almost 600 characters in it, most of which appear only briefly. They don’t end up as collateral damage (and for a book with “War” in the title, it has surprisingly few explosions), but relatively few of them spend much time on stage. There’s no doubt that the story is not about them.
Do you see yourself as the hero of the story?
Reread Exodus 1 and imagine you’re an Israelite in Egypt, born into captivity. Your parents – devout people – have told you the prophecy about the 400 years of captivity. And so there’s hope, right? A light at the end of the tunnel?
What if you’re only on year 156?
Generations of Israelites were born, lived their lives, and died in captivity. Did they not matter in God’s story? Of course they did. They were God’s chosen people. When God calls Moses in Exodus 3, He says He has seen His people’s affliction and heard their cries. They were not insignificant at all!
But the story wasn’t about them.
It’s not about you or me, either. Our role – like most of Tolstoy’s characters – is to move the story forward, to reveal something about the main character. This is something vital for us to understand.
It’s very easy – especially in the narcissistic world of social media and reality TV – to make the story about us. The tragic irony, of course, is that when I make the story about me, the story becomes trivial. Sure, there is drama: soaring highs, and painful lows. But those highs and lows ultimately have no significance, no purpose.
The Israelites in year 156 of the Egyptian oppression likely wondered if God had forgotten or abandoned them. In the same way, when we suffer, it’s easy to think that God’s absent, or that He doesn’t care, or that somehow things are out of control. But if the story is not about me, if God’s doing something and I’m simply playing a role in a much larger epic, then even my worst pain has a purpose. All the events of my life have incredible significance because of the role the Author has given me to play. This is my time on the stage – how will I move the story forward?
Some questions to think about:
- Based on how I live, who is the story about?
- What do the events of my life reveal about this story’s main character?
- If my purpose is to advance Jesus’ story, how does that affect my priorities and the choices I make?
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