I recently re-read one of my friend’s books. Well, I call him my friend. But he doesn’t even know my name or where I live and I doubt that he ever will. Still, should he find me the offer for friendship remains. His book is about story and how God wants us to live a good story on this earth so that when we get to Heaven we can sit with our Maker and reminice and be reminded of all the times we forgot, all the times we enjoyed and all the times that brought us conflict. I like that image. Sitting with God and laughing, crying and sitting in shock over what this gift of life offered us. I think I like it more than I know.
There is a part in the book where he talks about meaningful scenes and how they may not move the story along at all but all good stories have them. And though they may not be a pivotal point in the story, they bring meaning just the same. There is a scene in Garden State where the characters are all dressed in garbage bags in the rain standing on the edge of a canyon by a boat that is a house. In Lars and the Real Girl, Lars is seen dancing with his “girlfriend” in the garage that is his home. In Forrest Gump, Forrest is the backwoods of Vietnam describing the rain when all of a sudden the clouds clear to reveal a starry sky more beautiful than he has ever seen. In the movie Once, after recording their album, they all pile into the record executive’s car and blast it through the speakers while they drive around Northern Ireland at top speeds. The point is that meaningful scenes are important. They beg us to live a better life. They are the punctuation to a sentence that we will never forget.
It rained today. Like, serious rain. And it came all of a sudden. I stood at my window eleven floors up and just enjoyed it. I enjoyed the wind as it caressed my face, I enjoyed the raindrops and they hit my chest, arms and hands, I enjoyed the sweet smell of the air and the crack of the clouds as they unleashed their fury on the ground below. In the midst of all this I began to think about what my friend said about meaningful scenes and I thought that this might qualify as one.
The truth is I have been worried lately, worried that maybe I haven’t been living a good story. That maybe I was a few chapters behind everyone else in writing a story worth living, but in that instant, memories came flooding back to me. Like my first day in Uganda when I was standing under a tent buying coat hangers and all of a sudden got caught in a rain storm, the rain seeped into the grass and flooded the little market, it ran up over the soles of my flip flops and soaked my feet. Or the time my new roommates and I, only knowing each other for a few hours, put in our grubby clothes and ran through the rain barefoot late one night. I was reminded of the time I was at someone’s house whom I did not know, with a friend and at the first sign of down pour we ran out onto his deck and stood there till we were soaked to the bone and my mascara ran down my cheeks.
As I stood there watching the rain pool in my hands and drip down to street level I was overwhelmed at what I found. Maybe my story wasn’t as boring at I thought it was. Maybe I was living a good story, not quite there, but one that maybe one day would be worth writing down on paper. Maybe I hadn’t squandered all that God had given me. And in that moment I was truly grateful. Grateful to a God who made things like story that teach us what it is to live and that encourage us to keep living, I was grateful to a God who made the rain and the heavens that it falls from and that someday I will sit with Him and talk about this day and why it was special, just like so many others that He spoke to me through.
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