Yesterday we took off from Orlando into a sea of clouds. The
white outside my window was so thick, it was if we were flying through snow. And
the plane jerked and bumped and shuttered as if some crowd of giants were
pelting it with snowballs, a snowball gauntlet in the sky. In the moments of
calm I read through a back issue of Time, from the New Year, that Robert had
found lying around. Interesting to see yesterday’s predictions of today. In
fact the title was The Year Ahead. If
you ever want to read good fiction, read yesterday’s predictions. History has
yet to lose a game of “Cheat the prophet.” We never get it right. Appealing to tradition, one reporter was
predicting that Ted Cruz, with his dogged wooing of even the most remote
voters, would outdo his more flashy, filterless, jet-setting competitor. Who
knows. All traditions die sooner or later, and it doesn’t really pay to be
right, anyway. As another of the columnists quoted, “There’s an inverse
relation between fame and accuracy.”
In the waiting lounge at the airport, the TV overhead was
set to a news station, and in between flight announcements and Southwest’s
corny jokes, I heard soundbites from some of the American presidential candidates.
Bernie was ribbing Hilary about her emails with a bit of profanity thrown in
for the sake of modern ethos, and I caught this from Donald: “We can’t afford
to be that nice.” I considered this ironic coming from someone who has just been
compared to Jesus by a prominent Christian leader. Somehow I find it impossible
to square the hard things Jesus said about loving your enemy, the language of
love, with the knee-jerk language of fear I hear in “we cannot afford…”
But I don’t want this to be about American media stars. The
article that most caught my attention in the Time issue was entitled, “Media: Storytelling—both
fiction and nonfiction, for good and for ill—will continue to define the world,”
with the opening line: “We have examples of transformative storytelling all
around us.” The stories that the article mentions are not necessarily ones that
Evangelicals would find transforming. They might even be alarming. But the point
made was valid: “Stories matter. In 2016 and beyond, those who wish to create a
better world will have to make storytelling the center of their efforts…We will
have to see if 2016 will be a year in which stories of anger…are ascendant, or
whether stories of the power of love…rule the day. People will decide the
winners and losers. In this age of narrative, the stakes have never been
higher.”
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| St George and the Dragon |
As Christians we have a choice to make. What narrative do we
follow? What comes out of our mouth publicly as well as at home? Fear? (“We can’t
afford to be nice”) or Love? (For God so loved the world that he gave…) Are we
trying to “save our life” (or way of
life)? or are we willing to risk something to bring other people to God? I’m as
cowardly as the next person. I’m as fearful of something happening to my kids
or my husband. I used to have voices in my head telling me to fear, fear, fear.
I spent a year in depression fighting these voices and the havoc they played
with my emotions. But I learned that I have a choice to turn away from that
narrative. One day at a time I can choose not
to live a narrative of fear. Because love casts out fear. The world today
is desperate to hear a winning narrative. The loud narrative gaining ground all
around us right now is the natural, instinctive one, the easy, default go-to narrative
of fear. Love is a much harder story, but a truer one. At BSF right now, I am
studying in Revelation how God protects the Woman against the mighty Dragon. He
does. He, Love, is the Victor. This is our true story. Let’s tell it.
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