God is: a storyteller

I wrote this entire blog last night. But it died. Burned. Lost in the intergalactic web.

SIGH.

So here goes... take two.

The storyteller image of God goes way back to my childhood. See, as a child, I was really strange and abnormally pensive. I would spend a lot of time meditating and just sitting outside listening. Seriously, an extraordinary amount of time. I would ponder about eternity, try to grasp the complexity of God's lack of a beginning. I would debate in my head whether we have free will or if God is omnipotent and omniscient. Seriously. That is what I thought about as a kid. That's weird. When I was three, I came home from VBS, infuriated, saying, "Mommy, bad men at church killed Jesus." Days later, I came home in tears, "Mommy... I killed Jesus." That was the moment I entered into a strange relationship with God. It has blossomed into something glorious.
Just to further define the picture of my odd thoughts growing up:
"It was to be one of those bedtime for which my four-year-old daughter, Amanda, was famous. This time I was stumped. "Does God love Barbie?" she asked, with an earnestness that made me wish for her sake that He did. Not wanting to burst her bubble and not wanting to lie, I punted. "What do you think, sweetie?" She reasoned that He probably didn't, since dolls didn't have spirits. We were both satisfied."-Julie Evans (my mama)

I just feel like such a bizarre person when I think back on this stuff. Point of this all is that I used to get extremely bogged down on God-thought. I would become frustrated, and stumped, and so had to create an image in my head to solve it all (or at least distract me).

I decided that God was an old, mysterious man. He'd have a white beard, and would have the aura of the bookstore owner in The NeverEnding Story (BEST MOVIE EVER). I would picture God sitting in the middle of a murky nothingness, holding a gargantuan novel in one hand, and a pen in the other. I have always been a writer, and when you are lost in writing, time doesn't really pass. It either stops or you have left it. You are in this other dimension (the creative dimension?) and time does not exist. That helped me solve what life would be like without time. Then I would just think about all of the things God would write. Each molecule would at least have its own page. I would have an entire saga. God wrote down every minute detail that would happen in life. Thus, I reasoned he was omniscient and omnipotent. However, any writer knows that the character does not always do what you planned them to do. You say, "I want you to swing in, save the princess, marry her, and live happily ever after." But somewhere along the way Satan messes with it and instead your character develops a fear of rope and thus cannot swing, does not save the princess, and dies a bachelor. Free will. That explanation is good enough for me.

God is a storyteller. He's the man in Arabian Nights who is the master storyteller. He is the man who can captivate an audience in the first sentence. He's the man who is so good at writing, that we forget we are living out his story.