The Watsonian (blog)

‘A ship, belong­ing to a hea­then owner, was once sail­ing over the sea, one of the pas­sen­gers being a Jew­ish boy.  A great storm arose, and all the Gen­tiles aboard took hold of their idols and prayed to them, but to no avail.  See­ing that their prayers had been in vain, they said to the lad: “Call upon your God, for we have heard that He answers your peti­tions when you cry to Him and that He is all-powerful.”  The boy imme­di­ately stood up and called with all his heart upon God, Who hear­kened to his prayer, and the sea became calm.  On reach­ing land, they dis­em­barked to pur­chase their require­ments and said to him: “Do you not wish to buy any­thing?”  He answered: “What do you want of a poor alien like me?”  They exclaimed :  “You a poor alien!  We are the poor aliens; for some of us are here and have our gods in Baby­lon; other have them in Rome; other have their gods with them but they are no ben­e­fit to us.  As for you, how­ever, wher­ever you go your God is with you!“‘

“Lit­tle Red Rid­ing Hood went to her grandmother’s house and went inside.  She then went to the bed, where the wolf (who had just eaten her grand­mother) was dis­guised as her grandmother.

‘what big eyes you have,’ said LRRH.  ‘The bet­ter to see you with, my dear,’ replied the Wolf.

‘what big ears you have.’  ‘The bet­ter to hear you with, my dear,’ the Wolf stated.

‘what big teeth you have,’ LRRH said to the Wolf.  ‘All the bet­ter to eat you with my dear’

That’s it.  What if I told this story to my lit­tle girl?  What would this tell her?  How would she view peo­ple?  The world?

But that’s kind of what we do with God’s story.  We start in Gen­e­sis 3, where sin entered the pic­ture.  Where the arro­gance of human­ity, brought sin into the world, and caused our inti­mate con­nec­tion with our Cre­ator to be ruined.  But if peo­ple don’t know about how God spoke the world into exis­tence in the poem in Gen­e­sis 1, or how He called us ‘good’ and cre­ation ‘good’ then they are going to view this life as tem­po­rary hold­ing place till we go off  ‘into the wild blue yonder.’

To quote Rob Bell, ‘where we begin deter­mines the story we are telling.’

Begin­ning in Gen­e­sis 1 and going to Rev­e­la­tion 22, lets us know that what we do, how we live, really does mat­ter.  It’s not about going to Heaven as much as its about heaven com­ing here.  It’s not about evac­u­a­tion the­ol­ogy (i.e., ‘I’ll Fly Away’) but more about God’s plan of trans­for­ma­tion for Cre­ation (includ­ing, well, everything.)

So instead of it being about what we are pri­mar­ily not and against.  The story, the Gospel story, is about what God has called us from the begin­ning, GOOD, and how are lives, no mat­ter how messed up, can/will be trans­formed as we join in the renewal of all things.

So the story we believe and live in affects how we treat oth­ers, view God and view ourselves.

What story do you live in?