Monday Morning Devotion-January 14, 2019
The Script Writer
Lean on, trust in, and be confident in the Lord with all your heart and mind and do not rely on your own insight or understanding. Proverbs 3:5
In America the interest of sports fans is pretty much consumed from Sept until the first week in January by college football. Everyone wants to know which teams will be in the final
four and then win their way into the championship game. Then, who will be the National Champions of football?
This year some unique things happened and two undefeated teams, Alabama and Clemson with 14-0 records, ended up in the championship game. No team had finished a season 15-0 since 1897 (Penn). Obviously, another team would do that this year. But, which one?
As it turned out the underdogs, Clemson, surprised the football world in winning convincingly, by 28 points. But what happened after the game was even more surprising.
Clemson Coach Dabo Swinney told everyone in the stadium as well as an international television audience watching on ESPN: "I said this two years ago. You can't write a Hollywood script like this. Only God can do this and that's a fact. People may think I'm crazy or quacky or whatever, but only God can orchestrate this. No Hollywood producer can write it."
When Dabo and his team went to the dais to receive the trophy and he was in front of the microphone again he said: "To get to do it once and get to do it again, it's a blessing. It's just simply the grace of the good Lord to allow us to experience something like this…. all the credit, all the glory goes to the good Lord---number one; and number two to these young people."
Earlier Dabo had said: "So many coaches and great players never get this opportunity, and for us to get to do it twice, it's just the Grace of God. It's a blessing."
Think about that. God is writing the script for your life. What does that look like? Are you proceeding according to the script? Have you asked him to reveal to you the way your life script is being written? Or have you allowed other people or circumstances to edit and make changes in your life story that may not be His will or in His script for you.
In the last couple of years, I have learned a lot about script writing. I've been working on a screenplay that I believe has movie potential. It's called: "Seeing the Invisible, Doing the Impossible."
What I have learned first of all is that it takes a minor miracle to get a Hollywood producer interested in making a movie out of your script if you are a screenplay writer, or even if you have written others that have been made into movies. I've moved past that because I believe if it's God's will and I continue to work hard and learn all the ins-and-outs of having a successful screenplay then good thing will happen.
When I started out, the first thing I learned is to write a successful script/screenplay you must think visually. That means you have to consider how every word you write will look on a movie screen. How can an actor or actress make your words into scenes that will move, inform, or entertain an audience? How can they become the people you have created or real-life people you have written about?
Here's how Clemson QB Trevor Lawrence followed God's script. The 6' 5", 215-pound freshman, was only one-year removed from being a high school student and quarterbacking his high school team in Georgia.
Lawrence said in post-game interviews to the international audience: "Football is important to me, obviously, but it's not my life; it's not like the biggest thing in my life, I would say my faith is." No matter how big the situation is, it's not going to define me. I put my identity in what Christ says and who He thinks I am and who He says I am. So really, at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what people think about me or how good they think I play or whatever."
Before the game he had written on Twitter: "Just think about the privilege it is to have a Lord like ours. Imagine the mercy and grace it takes to offer us this life with Him. In all of our disgusting sin and how we've betrayed Him, He STILL pursues us. If He has done that, I'll live this life for Him. There's nothing that compares."
That says a lot about how Lawrence could perform with such poise on a big stage against a team that had five national championships.
What about us? We need to ask ourselves that question. How are we performing on this stage that we step out on each day? Every day is a gift from the Lord. Each day we are playing the role, in our own life story, that He has written for us to play. To get a role in a movie an actor has to audition. He or she has to read the script for a director and show that they understand the role and know how to bring it to life on the screen.
We don't have to audition. We already have the role and we are given the opportunity to play ourselves. Do we understand what role that script is telling us to play? Or do we allow another script writer to impose their edits and change our life story in ways that are not in accordance with our role in God's master script that we are supposed to act out?
While each of our lives is a story in itself it is also a subplot in God's story. As Donald Miller writes in "Storyline: Finding Your Subplot in God's Story": "As a writer, I see the Bible as a story. It's a story about unrequited love. It's a story about a God who loves a world that, for the most part, ignores Him. It's a sad story but it has a great ending."
In a way that story has already been written. I mean it hasn't happened yet, but for a God who lives outside of time, it's as good as done. And yet, the role you and I get to play in that story is still unfolding. And not only this, but actually get to decide our little part."
How will we play that part? It is little because it is a subplot in God's humongous, far-reaching, on-going Master plan for the world. We are privileged to have a role in that story.
It's up to each of us to act out the role written for us by the Master Script Writer.
Prayer: Thank you Lord for giving us a role to play in your Master plan. Help us to follow the script you have written for us. Amen!