Making Sense of Your Desires, Dreams, and Disappointments

What sort of story are we in?Throughout the ages people have given many different answers to this question. Your neighbors, coworkers, and local bookstore all offer different answers to our question. If you filled the room you’re in right now with a mixture of both atheists and deeply religious people you’d hear fifty different stories people believe in order to make sense out of their lives.

My conviction is that only one story is big enough to adequately answer this question, to explain all the beauty and all the brokenness we see in this world, to make sense of our desires, dreams, and disappointments. I’ve looked at the other answers to this question, the other stories that are out there, but they all felt too small. They didn’t ring true. I don’t know what people believe in your city, but my city is a diverse mix of Buddhists, Atheists, Sikhs, Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Mormons, Jews, and Confused (people who aren’t sure what they believe). My discovery and conclusion is that these other worldviews don’t make adequate sense of this world. Their plot has too many gaps, too shallow answers for our deepest pain, deepest desires, and deepest questions.

The Big Story, the story we need, is the old and ongoing story of the Bible. The Bible is a collection of ancient manuscripts written over fifteen hundred years by over forty different authors that tells one big story about God and people. It’s a strange story. It’s a good story. It’s a complicated and challenging story. It’s a thrilling story. It’s a story that’s still moving, a story in which you play an important part. It, I think, is the only story big enough to make sense out of everything you’ve been through and everything you and the people you love will face in the future.

From pages 10-11 of The Big Story.