I have a family of readers. They can get lost in a good book for hours, reluctantly surfacing when it’s time for dinner. Depending on the story, the kid you get back might be different from the one who opened the book. A simple, “Can you please let out the dogs?” might be met with grumpiness, irritability, even tears. They’ve been swept away by the story, internalizing the characters’ emotions and experiences.
Stories are powerful things.
When this happens with my kids, I remind them that they are not whichever much-maligned character they’ve been hanging out with, and I am not the wicked stepmother or the unfeeling headmistress. Usually that’s enough to reset their mind frame and restore them to themselves. They need a reminder of what’s real to shake off the fog of fiction.
I’ve been thinking about this lately, as the narratives in the news and on social media seem particularly loud and insistent. Every media channel has a story they are trying to sell but we don’t have to buy them all. We have a choice about which stories we choose to get swept up in, which we internalize and carry into our real, everyday life.
Sometimes what we need most is to be reminded of who we are and who the other people in this adventure are. We’re not characters in the media’s drama, but part of God’s story. It’s a story of victory in a long, drawn out battle against a cruel enemy, of the redemptive power of love, of the triumph of mercy over judgment. The story isn’t happening to us, but is something happening within us, a great transformation from hopelessness to hope, from death to life. It’s a testimony to what’s possible, not what’s probable, because God is the Author. He doesn’t waste a character, a sentence, a situation. Every word is powerful and effective. He is able to rewrite what was intended to bury us into His incredible story of goodness – He’s writing good into the most desperate situations, into the most trying circumstances.
It sounds like make-believe, but it’s true.