Put Down The Pen

Each day on this earth, we as God’s children have a choice: We can try to write our story as we wish it to appear or we can record it as it happens. That right there is the struggle of our lives.

My temptation is to create a well-written story that looks good on paper. I want a wonderful beginning, an exciting and well –thought out middle and a happy ending. The trouble is the three don’t always go together and one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other.

A few years ago I had my story finished. The beginning I couldn’t change that simply happened to me. I could cut sections to make it easier on the eye .The problem was that robbed each chapter and left my life sounding like a Hallmark Card.

As I look over my story I find the last few chapters, comforting yet vague, boring and not at all what the man inside wants them to look like. I wonder what would happen if I were to rip those pages from the binder, burn them, and say to God, “Okay, here’s the pen, you write the rest?”

And that is where I sit, right now, right here, in this place. I have handed the pen (or computer in my case) to someone I can’t see and given Him permission to create the conclusion. As a writer I keep trying to add words here and there to make it sound better. I find myself trying to edit God by drawing my own assumptions as I attempt to trim the twists and turns that cause a great story.

We each claim to seek adventuresome lives with jumps and twists and great mystery but when it comes right down to it we try to write out those chapters or put a choke hold on them whenever possible.

Yesterday as I was riding back down Mount Hood on my bike the speed at which my body was flying down that six percent grade was scary. I saw the sign up above and thought of God. He’s provided escape routes if needed so why am I so afraid to take my hands off the break and “go for it.”

I want to live my life as if there is an Escape Ramp for Runaway Trucks. So Rick, put the pen down, get your finger off the delete button, take your hand off the break and let’s go. We’ve got a story to write.

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  Ben Woolley June 25, 2009 at 11:17 am

  This reminds me of a passage I found again via google books.

  Two Happy Ones:

  Truly, despite his youth, this person knows how to improvise life and amazes even the keenest observer — for he never seems to make a mistake even though he constantly plays the riskiest game. It reminds one of those masters of musical improvisation to whose hands the listener would also like to ascribe a divine infallibility even though, like every mortal, they make a mistake here and there. But they are practiced and inventive and always ready at any moment to incorporate into the thematic order the most accidental note to which the stroke of a finger or mood drives them, breathing a beautiful meaning and soul into an accident.

  Here is an entirely different person: basically everything he wills and plans goes wrong. What occasionally he set his heart on several times brought him to the edge of the abyss and within a hair of destruction; and if he did escape that, it was certainly not just “with a black eye.” Do you believe he is unhappy about this? He decided long ago not to take his own wishes and plans so seriously. “If I don’t succeed at this,” he says to himself, “I might succeed at that; and on the whole I don’t know whether I should be more grateful towards my failures than towards any success. Was I made to be stubborn and to have a bull’s horns? That which constitutes the value and outcome of life for me lies elsewhere; my pride as well as my misery lie elsewhere. I know more about life because I have so often been on the verge of losing it; and precisely therefore do I get more out of life than any of you!”

  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 303

  Firstly, it seems that he has discovered the emo kid in the second happy one. Secondly, it seems that what you are writing about is the first happy one.

  Personally, I put it this way: the first happy one sees the effects of his actions, judging his actions by what they produce, not by whether they satisfy a particular goal. He has so tuned his instincts to his surroundings that he is naturally prepared to derive not just any meaning, but even the meaning that is right in front of him. He lets his own view of what happens provide an aesthetic awareness that allows him to incorporate the effects of an accident into a newly-reformulated medium on which to perform his next action.

  If you are looking for a new purpose, is that not what you have to do? To let purpose be a new opportunity? To see all purpose? Wouldn’t God let you choose among any of the purposes He provides? Letting God in your life could effectively be letting purpose into your life.