He set it all out before us in Christ, a long-range plan in which everything would be brought together and summed up in him, everything in deepest heaven, everything on planet earth. Ephesians 1:10 (MSG)
All Things – The Storyteller Series – Part 2
Go to PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 | PART 5 | PART 6 | PART 7
Nine times out of ten, when I’m sitting with my friends, or my kids, or ANYONE, and I'm retelling a story, Jesse (husband) will look at me when I’m done and say, “That's not what happened. At all.”
Sometimes it's funny.
Sometimes it's frustrating. For both of us. Haha!
My imagination blurs the lines and the way I remember the details does not always reflect reality. Confession: sometimes, I even get my dreams mixed up with real life. I start telling a story, and halfway through I’ll think, “perhaps I dreamt this?” Needless to say, I love a good tale.
Unlike me, Jesus retells the story of our lives perfectly. Truthfully. Faithfully.
Situations and circumstances both within and outside of our control can blur the lines of our reality. The ‘truth' about our lives can be masked by hurt, pain, offense, neglect, sin, greed, hate, a misplaced self-worth, lies. It’s hard to tell what the truth actually is. Have you ever seen a movie based on a true story? One that you are intimately acquainted with? You know the details, the real-life characters, the setting and the narrative? Only to have the representation of that story to be far from the truth? Yet others who see the film have no idea if the story is true or not, and take the story presented to them as ‘gospel-truth.' It feels like an injustice when our stories are falsely communicated; when we are misrepresented, misunderstood, seen to be something that we’re not, taken out of context. And that wrong context is believed.
I think The Christ knows exactly what that feels like. The Divine and Infinite, the essence of life, is threaded through all things. Age upon age, he witnesses people hearing a story that they believe to be the truth, but is, in fact, a misrepresented, contorted and twisted version of it. Only half of the story, containing just enough truth to appear real and just enough lies to taint and pollute.
For each of us, the combination of these truths and lies presents in different ways, different scenes and moments, but the narrative of this toxic story is the same: Separation. Division. Disunity. John talks about it, in chapter 15 of his letter, as being disconnected from the vine – the source of life.
Jesus came in human form, the Divine-incarnate in flesh, the infinite housed in the finite, to retell the story. To unravel the narrative of life that has gotten so twisted up.
The way that the word unity has been translated in Ephesians 1:10, leaves us with a few different words that we could use to describe it. Unity: gather together, sum up, recapitulate, bring back together under one head.
Jesus is reconnecting and summing EVERYTHING up in him. He is retelling the story in such a way that draws all things back to, and into, himself. Through his retelling, we can see the reality of our connectedness, that there is grace (and more grace) for all of creation, and that Divine love – the signature of all things – is written across every page of life.
He is redeeming us all, everything, one by one, heaven and earth, back to himself. He is our common denominator, the glue, the author, the essence of life that is in us all. And through us, his story is being retold to the world that has been left wanting.
Jesus, our Divine Storyteller, tells the truth about hope, faith and love; written with grace, inked with blood. Permanent and fixed.
How has your story been re-written? Leave us a comment below.
Go to Part 3 – His Poetry »
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