Our lives are like stories. Every story has a beginning. You began as a dream in the heart of God. God had a name and a plan for Jeremiah, John the Baptist, and for Jesus before they were even conceived. Ephesians 2:10 says that God had in mind what He wanted you to do before you were born.

God is the first person to write in our stories. He determines our skin and hair color, our talents and giftedness, our IQ, our parents, and when and where we are born into history. God continues to attempt to write our stories but sometimes we take the pen from Him and write our own stories.

Our parents get to author parts of our stories, especially in the early pages. We grow up poor, wealthy, or somewhere in between. We grow up feeling loved or wondering if anybody really cares about us. If our parents don’t love us, how could anyone else love us? We grow up feeling safe or insecure. Early in our lives we are reaping what our parents are sowing, either good or bad.

As we age, though, we get the pen. We can continue to dance in step with the story that God is trying to write in our lives or we can begin to write our own stories. There is someone that He wants us to become, but He’ll allow us to become whoever we decide to be. 

Some of us give our pens to others along the way who then become the writers of our stories. Because we want to fit in and be accepted by some group of people, we become what they want us to be, not necessarily who we want to be. How they look, if they drink, smoke, have sex, etc., determines what we do because we want to “belong” somewhere. Having no strong, personal identity, we attempt to get one from some group of people, possibly even a gang.

Stories have ups and downs. There are high points in our stories where we are doing right and things are going right. These high points happen most often when we are allowing God to co-author our stories. There are also low points when we make unwise choices and things do not go well in our lives. The story that God wants to write for us is a better story than any that we could write.

The good news is that stories have chapters. Anywhere in the story, we can take the pen back, think clearly, end a chapter, and change the course of the story. What has taken place in the early chapters of our lives does not have to determine what takes place in the next chapter(s) of our lives. Paul was a persecutor of the church who encountered Christ, took his pen, rewrote his story, and became the primary personality in the New Testament church.

The truth is that our lives are the sum total of the things we write (the choices we make). People with great lives feel blessed, but they know that their blessed life is not just by chance. They intended and worked toward having good lives. They used their pens wisely. Their lives were supposed to turn out this way.

Tragically, people with disappointing lives more often than not think that those with blessed lives are just lucky. They fail to realize that since reaching adulthood, they have had control of their pens and their stories. Some gave their pens to others who wrote bad scripts. Some wrote their own stories and are simply reaping according to the bad that they have sown.   

It’s your story; you can end a chapter and begin a new one anytime you choose to do so. If your story is not a good one at this point in your life, you can take the pen and change what takes place in the next chapter. 

The end of the story turns out the way it does because of the way we write its chapters. God had a great story in mind when He began to write your story. “Dance” with Him and you’ll learn to love both the journey and the end.