Every story told, from a tricky snake pushing apples, to today’s breaking news, must ultimately be told within the context of the one Great Story—God’s story. God alone has perfect understanding of how every subplot is being woven together to bring about the ending that is completed in His mind.

To tell a story without mentioning Him is like my three-year-old, Cade, telling some neighbors, “Yup- I lives in dat house over dere wiff my two kids” (his siblings). We chuckled at his failing to mention the parents who also live ‘over dere’, and who pay his mortgage and cut up his meat and wrap him in a warm towel after his bath. While it’s funny now, if after 20 years or so, he’s still completely omitting us from the story of his life, it won’t be as funny.

Some of us are a little like Cade. We tell about our life’s adventures, successes, tragedies, and heartbreaks without ever mentioning the one who first breathed life into our lungs. Every mountaintop and valley that we experience unfolds within the pages of the story that He is writing. He wrote the opening paragraph and his plot underlines every word on each line of our first person accounts. Whether we’re cognizant of it or not, our biographies have been “written in” to the One Great Story—God’s.

So as a writer, I want to tell stories for what they are: subplots within THE story. I want to give the big picture context because without it, the storyline collapses! Extracting God from the plot leaves a story as hollow as Jim Carey’s character in ‘The Truman Show’, who lived without any context of his life at all. That movie, without the scenes that included the director and the outside watching world, would be as bland and unsatisfying as Truman was portrayed to feel.

The context for our existence is God. Every story relates to him. My hope as a writer is to tell stories that are like tiny paragraphs that fit perfectly into the massive plot and thrilling purpose of the one Great Story being written by the Author of all creation: God.