Dad jokes aside – Life is a story. It is the first story. The ultimate story. The last story.
If life were a story, the experience of the story would be living it – inhabiting it. This is how we read novels. We use our minds and imagination to go inside the story in a way, observing the events unfold.
What is interesting is that when we read a story, we perceive the events happening chronologically, even though they do not happen that way at all. The whole story is already written from beginning to end. No passage of time is required.
However, to experience a story, we focus on one word at a time. We spend our actual time to make the story work. The story, in a way, receives time from us like a car receives gasoline. I think that this spending of time is actually what makes you so emotionally invested in a novel. It’s because you have, in fact invested yourself through your time.
This experience of the story that we live each day can be confusing. We can forget that it’s a story, with an author, and pretend like it is something else.
Maybe it’s a random collection of matter and energy somehow efficiently organized?
Consider for a moment that the story is already written. Let that boggle the mind as you wiggle your hand randomly (or so you think) asking, “Was this already written? What about… this?”
How can something already be written if I seemingly choose what to do each day?
I am attempting to write a novel. And until I attempted it, I thought the above was a valid question. I still had answers for it of course and I think they are good answers.
But when I started trying to write a story, I realized that the characters in my story really do make their own decisions. And if I try to force my plot on them without their consent, they object. If the characters don’t get to make their own choices, the story falls flat. But when I let them speak, the story becomes more of an adventure.
The author/character relationship is almost like a dance (I’m discovering). The characters take the paths available to them according to who they are, and the author works with those choices to move the story along. And yet, the story is still a complete work, requiring no time to pass. The words are already written.
It is as if every movement of the dance is captured and laid out like freeze frames of a movie. The lives we experience are the inhabitations of that story, the living of it in time.
What all of this means, it seems to me, is that there are no real contradictions between the simultaneous truths of our choice and God’s perfectly written story. Or to say it using standard theological jargon – our free will is compatible with God’s sovereignty.
And as far as boggling the mind goes, that idea goes a long way.