A good calling

Julia ♦ October 23, 2024 ♦ 2 Comments

Here’s one of the better stories to remember from October 2016.

“We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn’t mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It’s a good calling, then, to speak a better story. How brightly a better story shines. How easily the world looks to it in wonder. How grateful we are to hear these stories, and how happy it makes us to repeat them.” 
― Donald Miller

Each of us could tell all sorts of stories about our lives, or about the world around us. Depending on where we direct our focus, we can make of this life a comedy or a tragedy; a grand adventure or an exercise in absurd futility.

If you’ve read Yann Martel’s wonderful book Life of Pi (or seen the film which is a worthy screen adaptation of the literary masterpiece) you know that the entire message of the tale is captured in the words of the protagonist at the end, when he asks the skeptics which is the better story to believe. Those of us who have always chosen hope over despair will feel vindicated by the book’s conclusion. No wonder President Obama called the book (in an unsolicited and largely unknown word of personal praise to the author) “an elegant proof of God.”

Truth is still truth, of course, whether we like it or not. Much of reality is harsh, and not all stories have happy endings. Yet, as in Martel’s book, victory can ultimately shine through defeat, and some of us will always believe that all earthly sorrows will be redeemed and made right in the end. My fondest hope, for every person reading this, is that each of us will discover the source of this invincible hope, and hold to our faith no matter what life may bring.

This post was first published seven years ago. The original post, comments and photo are linked, along with two other related posts, below. These links to related posts, and their thumbnail photos, do not appear in the blog feed; they are only visible when viewing the individual posts by clicking on each one. I have no idea why, nor do I know how they choose the related posts. That’s just the way WordPress does things.