Lost in the Pages
 | Lost in the Pages: A Character's View of Life is Greg's first solo book,
and will be released on March 4, 2011. Learn more about Lost in the Pages, the launch party. Can't attend the release and want a signed copy? Email Greg at the link in the sidebar. |
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Excerpt from Chapter One
Much of the time, life looks like a muddled mess. The weatherman forecasts, the bookie sets odds, the investor picks stocks. We plan our days, plan our weddings, plan our retirements. We set goals, cast visions, and write business plans. We place our trust in friends, our money in trusts, and our faith in God. We map out our vacations and educations. We build our careers and our homes, raising our children and our expectations. But when tomorrow comes, far too often we don’t recognize it. Despite all our efforts, it is uncontrollable...
But what if life is more like a story? What if God is more like an author, and we are more like characters in tale he is telling? What if we are living in a novel that has come to life?
Think about it: what are the essential elements of a story? Conflict and surprise plot twists. Protagonists and antagonists, each with their own arc or thread through the story, bumping into each other. No one knows what’s going to happen next, or why. The characters don’t see everything. Things that happen in chapter two sometimes don’t come back or have significance until chapter thirty-seven. The Author drops clues and foreshadows what is to come, but the characters don’t get to see where the plot is going, or why, or how they fit into it. None of the characters know if they are the central protagonist, or just a supporting player.
We weave tales that neatly tie together our past and present, and conveniently align us toward the future that we want to believe God has planned for us. But our effort at control are futile: we are inside a story that God has written and is bringing to life. We are characters in the Story of Stories. We don’t know what the important parts are, since we only experience our own scenes. We don’t see the larger conflict in the story, only the parts of it which we encounter. We don’t know if we’re living in the first, second, or third act of the play. We don’t know if we’re on page ten or page ten thousand. We don’t know if we’re central characters, antagonists or protagonists. We don’t know if we’re an extra in the background, or essential for moving the plot forward. We can’t know any of those things. We live in a sequence of page turns: each morning we wake up and the page is turned. We can’t go back, nor can we skip ahead to see how things will turn out. We don’t know how or when our lives will end, or what role our final scene plays in the bigger plot...
Instead of being a muddled mess, our lives are baffling tales. They may be hard to understand, but they are not without direction and purpose. Instead of having lost a trail that we were supposed to be able to follow, we are playing our part in a cosmic drama. Instead of being frustrated instruments in an obscure plan, we are characters in stories full of wonder and heartbreak, joy and tragedy. Our lives will only make sense in hindsight, as we see the threads of the narrative woven together and resolved in the final chapter. We are not lost on a journey, we are lost in the pages.
