Issue 562
Have you noticed that each week of your life you create a further chapter in your life story? You may not think of it in such terms but, moment by moment, somehow you are a storyteller.
I wonder if you have realized that this ability to write your own unique story is an amazing gift from God to you. Let me try to describe or unwrap this gift with you.
First, you come wrapped in your skin. Your skin shows a unique face to the world. But inside your skin there is a one-off person, you.
God has given you consciousness, he has breathed into you something indescribable but real nevertheless. He has combined within you the ability to think, feel, act, reflect and choose. In short, he has given you the inner tools to create a story.
This gift is perhaps bigger than you think. No one else can create your story for you. If you try to pass your storytelling to someone else, you diminish yourself and soon discover it can’t be done.
No one can live your life but you. Hiding from this is the nature of addictions, refusing to face yourself. Yet embracing this is to discover your true nature.
Such is Christmas. A baby boy arrives to create a story, to build an I Am, to lay a path. If you are prepared to look at him very, very carefully (it can’t be done with a casual glance) you will see him create the perfect story. In fact, your destiny depends on him doing this.
Thirty-three years into his story the Son of Man tells you he is the way and no one comes to the Father except through him. He is telling you that he is the only way. Stop and look. He is also telling you that he has to follow his path, his way, create his story because only he can.
The only way means the alone way, the solitary way. No one else can do this for him. His way will take him to Jerusalem, to a trial, to a death on a cross, to utter aloneness, through death and back to his original home.
To follow him will take you to your cross, the death and rebirth of your inner life and the acquisition of new and powerful inner tools to create your story.
But it will still be yours. Only you can live your life – that’s why it’s called your life.
Inside your skin lives as solitary soul, a person that only you can really be and know. When your story overlaps with the Son of Man you are transformed from loneliness to solitary. Paul Tillich Is quoted as identifying the word loneliness to mean the pain of being alone and solitude to describe the glory of being alone.
Either way “alone” Is what you and I are. The Son of Man, by embracing his own way, has created a way for you to experience the glory of your solitude.
Don’t despise it. This means you can now enjoy this amazing gift of your life. You have a unique personality, a unique purpose, a unique inner life. It is a mark of God ‘s profound love for you that he respects you enough to give you the freedom to create your own story.
When you say no one really knows how I feel, you are right. When you say no one understands me, you are right. When you say no one knows what I’m going through, you are right.
But if you think this means you must be lonely you are wrong. The Son of Man has come down and, by creating his unique story, opened up the way from loneliness to solitude, pain to glory.
Refusing to embrace your solitude will force you into a fight with reality.
Each day this week you will do the things that only you can do, say things that only you can say, choose things that only you can choose. This is your story, this is your life, no one, not even God himself, will live it for you. Such is your glory.
That is love, that is human, that is Christmas
Work well.
Geoff Shattock
BIBLE SECTION
John 14:5-7
5 Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”
6 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”
Hebrews 10:5
5 Therefore, when Christ came into the world, he said: “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me;
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Work well
Geoff Shattock
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