“What’s your story?”
Now there’s a loaded question. in television and the movies this seemingly simple question is often asked to introduce a significant character quickly. To give us a glimpse into who a person is and why they do what they do. From angsty teen dramas to dramas featuring cops or lawyers or doctors to superheroes, a character’s story ends up driving a good portion of where a series goes. Not surprising really, because as much as we want to figure out who did the crime or what is really wrong with that little girl, it’s the human drama that captures our attention, our imagination. The best stories make us feel like we are there, that we are a part of the action. It is not hard to imagine that we are.
Being a part of the story matters to us. So much of our lives revolves around trying to figure out where we fit, what part of the story we are playing. It’s relatively easy to fit in when we are very young, before we become aware of the larger narratives swirling around us, Then, sometime around junior high, things get real. Figuring out our place in the story takes over and it is usually not a terribly fun experience.
In the early 2000s lots of Christians were getting up in arms about Harry Potter. The first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Philosopher’s Stone originally in England, because the American publisher Scholastic didn’t think people would associate “philosopher” with magic), had been published in the US in 1998 and had quickly become very popular among young readers. For obvious reasons Christians had questions. At the time I was working for a chain of Christian bookstores and something of a cottage industry started—books about Harry Potter and faith. I wondered what all the fuss was about and whether or not, as a book buyer, I should pay attention to all these books. So, I bought the cheapest copy I could find, expecting to find a middle of the road book written for children, which may or may not have been a problem but which probably didn’t deserve all the hype from the broader world or from Christians. It didn’t take me long to recognize what was going on. For starters, J.K. Rowling was a good writer. Both her prose and the way she developed the story was very well done and quite clever, weaving history and the mundane every day in with her fantasy world. But that alone wouldn’t have been enough to trigger the avalanche of interest. Why was Harry Potter immediately so popular? Because this well-written story hit a nerve. Harry was a misunderstood, bullied junior high age kid who was suddenly part of a secret world, rich, and good at the most popular sport among his peers. Toss in a dash of secrets, intrigue, magic, and bad guys big and coming after him repeatedly, and voila! I found myself asking, “what part of this don’t you understand? Every junior high kid on the planet resonates with this.” Because we all want to be a part of a story that matters. TV and movies and novels are a way that we can be, if only for a moment. 1
But what if we are a part of the story?
We spend so much time trying to escape our own story, the one that we think is too boring or sad or inconsequential or otherwise awful and into the stories of others—real or imagined—that we miss the real nature of the story we are in.
We don’t realize that somewhere along the way we have internalized a very dangerous way of seeing the world, one that inadvertently relegates what is truly important to an afterthought, a footnote, or a means to an end. We don’t do it consciously. We certainly don’t want to and our initial response is to deny it. But we do it nonetheless. Your story. My story. We think of ourselves as the main character—and increasingly large swaths of our culture valorize the idea of having “main character energy.” And slowly, bit by bit, little by little, we instrumentalize the things around us, even the most important things, turning them into little more than a means for navigating a difficult world successfully, for getting “ahead”, never mind the fact that we have never bothered to question or define what we mean by the term. We even (often) do it with our faith, looking for ways that the Bible can be used to make our lives better. As Christopher Wright recently articulated in his interview with Apollos Watered,
It’s easy for us to imagine that this book [the Bible] is just an object, that it is just something that I have to somehow apply to my life . . . so the Bible becomes somewhat adjectival to me, I’m the center of the universe, I’ve got the Bible, I’ve got God in my life. I think seeing it the other way around is actually important.2
The Bible becomes “adjectival.”
There’s a sentence. It hit me square in the face when I heard it. As a writer I pay attention to parts of speech. An adjective modifies a noun. Wright is pointing out a particular danger with the way we view the Bible. We treat it as something that will modify, our lives. We are the noun in the sentence, the main character. We are the driving force. The story is ours and the Bible is there to help us out along the way.
But what if we do see it “the other way around?” What if we came to realize that the Bible tells the story that we are in? Everything changes. As Wright states, we are in the Bible, in that part between the resurrection and the return of Christ. Which means we are a part of that story, his story, not the other way around. When we recognize that we are playing parts in God’s story, when we see it from that perspective, everything has to change. It’s not that our part doesn’t matter, or that there is no significance to the things that happen to us or the relationships we have. Far from it. It is precisely because we are a part of God’s story that our true importance can be seen.
We are a part of the grand story of what God is doing. A story beyond any imagining we might have. We are participants in God’s grand plan for the universe. What could possibly be bigger? What could be more important—no matter how small we might think our individual role is.
Does the Bible apply to my life? Of course it does. But it is so much more than an add on, a means of getting along in the world. The Bible records the story of God and his people. A people who are shaped by the God who invites us to participate, who gives us a mission.
The people that we are closest to are the ones who make us feel like our stories matter, that we matter. Those are the people we call in the middle of the night when something does terribly wrong. They are the ones that we call when something goes absolutely right. They know our stories, the best parts and the worst parts and they are still there. Hopefully we are there for them as well. We are a part of one another’s stories, we shape one another in them. This is what God invites us into.
When we look at the Bible—its instructions and commands, its rules and its records of those who came before us, its revelation of Jesus Christ as God with us who breaks into the broken reality of our world to reign now as well as at the end of all things—we catch a glimpse of who God is, of the story he is telling. That can and should affect how we interact with the Bible. No longer is it simply about figuring out how to live “my life.” No longer is it a means of determining ethical lines or cosmic fire insurance. No longer is the Great Commission a task to achieve so that Christ will come, and we can finally get what we want.
Instead, we see the grand story and our part in it. We will struggle and stumble. We will get things wrong, but we will be shaped by the story, we will seek not just to understand it so that we can answer the questions rightly (as if there was going to be a spiritual test administered upon death), but so that we can be conformed to the image of Christ, so that we can participate in the mission he has given us. A mission far larger than gathering converts, a mission to draw people to be with God, to obey everything Jesus has commanded. A mission that does not make the Bible an adjective in our lives but rather reflects the fact that we are a part of its story, that God invites us to be a part of leading others to eternal life:
This is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and the one you have sent —Jesus Christ. (John 17:3)
What story are we living in? Your story? My story? Or God’s story? The answer makes all the difference.
- For the record, I do have some problems with Harry Potter, not the least of which is the fact that over seven books she never develops any real reason that Harry’s mom ever fell in love with his dad—he remains something of a jerk in every reminiscence and we never see growth. Add to that the fact that almost every male character in Harry’s life is fundamentally untrustworthy or self-serving and even the decent ones are either seriously broken or not anyone that you would look up to (especially as a junior high aged male). Oh, and on the magic side of things, my concern is not so much what is there as what is left out—on the whole the magic in Harry Potter is little more than a fantasized version of science which doesn’t particularly take the spiritual world all that seriously. ↩︎
- Christopher J.H. Wright, “Exploring the Depths of Scripture: The Importance of the Whole Story with Christipher J.H. Wright, Part 2”, interviewed by Travis Fleming, For Those Who Serve the Lord (podcast), released 4/1/25.
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