I'll confess that I'm more of a watch-the-movie than read-the-book person. That's mainly because of my difficulty with reading. But I have learned there is something lost when we forget the story first written.
That's not to say there isn't creativity and depth in the movie. The movie, though, has a timeline it needs to stick to. No one's watching twelve-hour movies--unless it's broken up into episodes on Netflix. Even then, there can be a richness of the story that doesn't come to light without the reading. A movie condenses a book. Characters are trimmed, plots get simplified and details need to be skipped.
I wonder if we try to get the movie version out of life, too. We look for shortcuts, hoping to avoid the hard parts and rush to the end. In doing so, we miss the depth of what God has written into our journey.
Reading takes patience, focus and imagination. These tools help you step into the author's world. Life, as God's gift, asks us for the same. Attentiveness, reflection and full participation help us live into the life God unfolds. Trusting God, then, means leaning into the full story, not just the easy or exciting parts.
The psalmist says that God has written our days before one of them came to be. That means even the slow and confusing pages have meaning. In a book, even small details can prove purposeful later. Likewise, there's no season of your life wasted in God's story. God weaves ordinary days into God's own larger story. Seeing life as this gift means valuing every "page" of life God gives us.
A movie does the imagining for you. With a book, you have to envision the words on each page. Living within God's story is like that. The Lord gives us words, but we participate by jumping into the unfolding of where God is leading.
All that to say, trust the life God has given you. Embrace the ups and downs as part of your story. In so doing, you let life be both a gift received and a gift given.
Stay blessed...john | 
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