Tripping Over Typeset

I’m from a small, farming community in Southwest Iowa. It’s in ‘fly over country’, as some might say.

On one of our final days of our 28-day-journey, we were visiting my hometown’s museum.

My sister and I went from exhibit to exhibit, reading the stories of those from before and my heart whispered again, “Each one is a story…and He knows them all.”

I stood there surrounded by pictures, artifacts and writings from earlier days and this simple truth dropped into my mind:

In their time, they were just living their days. They simply worked hard, plowed their fields, taught their children and washed their clothes.   Their focus wasn’t fame or how their picture would someday hang on the wall of a museum. Yet now we read their stories and we marvel at their perseverance, their fortitude and their willingness to live out their story despite hardship, sickness and loss all mixed in.

For the stories of our lives, He marks out our appointed times in history and the places where we live.

God placed us at our particular place and time in the story so that in the living out of our days we would find Him there in the midst of it all. (Acts 17:26-27)

Our story is important and makes a difference.

It’s our time —- the time when He placed us.

It’s our place —-the place where He planted us.

It’s in our time and our place where we make the difference for Him.

Our story line weaves in and out with others. We’re not a solitary book on the shelf but our lives are a part of a series with many editions, preludes and sequels.

One leads to another… one life touches another.

We each are a story written with purpose.

We may feel our bindings are worn and our dust covers are gone… we may have torn pages and feel that somewhere a chapter has gone missing.

But just as we have to read some stories all the way until the end before it all makes sense, we also must trust God, the Author of our stories, until the end to see the meaning in it all.

We may never end up on a museum wall or be rich, famous or known by the masses, yet our story matters.

We each have a place we are going….we each have a place we have been.

There are still chapters to be written, still characters to enter and some who will leave. There are great moments of love, adventure and excitement along with many days of just “plowing the fields and washing the clothes.”

Our story will bend, twist and sometimes throw us off-balance. Yet when we trust The Author, we see even in the not so pretty chapters there is beauty in our stories…written with love and purpose.

Our challenge is to be okay with our story.  Be okay with where He has placed us and when He has placed us here.  He knows what He’s doing…Let’s trust Him…the Author of our faith.

Linking up today with Jennifer Lee Dukes