Into the Storm

There's a lot of talk in the media today about the coming hurricane.  Is it weird that part of me really wants to just jump in the car and head to the east coast?  (Almost) everyone who lives there has enough sense to evacuate and I'm wanting to head right into it all.  Maybe it's because I have a strong sense of adventure and my everyday life is pretty mundane.  I get excited when I hear "earthquake" and "hurricane".  Don't get me wrong, I don't want anyone to die or suffer loss, and I know with nature disasters that's pretty much unavoidable, but the idea still excites me.

I think everyone can relate.  We all want adventure and excitement in our lives.  We all want to be the hero in the story.  It starts when we're young and we fight imaginary monsters with sticks, and it lessens some as we grow older but it never really goes away.  We watch movies and read books and put ourselves into it.  We all want to be William Wallace in Braveheart, or Tom Cruise in the Last Samurai, or...I don't know, Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean.  But in the story of our own lives, and in the grand story that God is writing, we're not the main character.  In the story that God writes, we don't have the leading roll, He does.  If all of history were the movie Braveheart, we're not William Wallace, we're the villager who gets axed 5 minutes in.

When we try to make ourselves the main character and pretend the whole movie is about us, we end up missing the real point of everything.  If you want a more in-depth discussion on this point, I recommend a book by Louie Giglio called I Am Not But I Know I AM.  It helps put everything in perspective.  It reveals that if we really want true adventure we will abandon the idea that the story of life is all about us and see Jesus as the true hero.

When we finally do that, we can join in the greatest adventure of all, and not drive and drive for hours towards a hurricane.  Even though I still think it would be pretty cool...

I'll end with a quote from Louie's book that I mentioned.  "You are a galactic nobody--in fact 99.9999999999 percent of the people on earth have never heard of you.  But God knows everything about you and calls you His own.  What more could we possibly achieve on earth that is greater than what we already have?  We are friends of God.  What greater prize or position could we hope to gain?  What praise of men could eclipse the voice of I AM speaking to us by name?"