The Larger Story.
What’s the Larger story? A mother of four struggles to get her master’s degree, balancing time with her family, her current job and her school. Then into the mix rolls the seasonal flu. Now several of her children are down for the count - isolated in bed while this sickness trudges through their tiny frames.
It’s a flashy place to live and this new recruit to the team at work is settled into the new job but isolated in this new city. He’s wondering, “where are my people?” Life is good but life is also a complicated - it's a struggle. How will this all make sense?
Her life has been an unbroken string of failures and losses. She married young but he was hit with cancer shortly after their son entered this world. Now decades later, she sits at the other end of her life and wonders what it all was about. How does she make sense of this?
You’ve probably heard the term: metanarrative. It’s an adept term used in literature to describe the larger context of a smaller story. Often this smaller story is a chapter of the whole book or series of books. If you only had that chapter, you might find it very difficult to bring meaning out of the smaller narrative - that particular chapter. But when you have the whole book or series for context, then this metanarrative makes sense of the smaller story within the larger story. Here is a video that helps explain this more: Mic Check - "Your Life Has Meaning" Episode 1
Metanarrative aids our comprehension of the point of our life. Too often we look at the small stage of our life and miss that these short years of our existence actually fit into a full-blown eternal theater; all is divinely staged. The Master of all ceremonies sits arranging and setting new scenes, developing each emerging character in order for the final scene to come to fruition. Who is the Master? Colossians will help us see His identity: “For by him [Jesus] all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. 17 And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent” (Colossians 1:16-18).
Our role in this grand scene is to know that Jesus is the connecting point to the larger narrative. God saves through this Jesus. God the Father sets all things in motion so that the only possible hero could be our rescuer and our Lord. “In Him all things hold together.” We can’t always make sense of our little scene; but it is for Him to be the head of the body [of Christ], His Church . . . those of us who follow Jesus.
Peter and the disciples were straining at the oars and their narrative didn’t make sense. In one event they asked, “why was Jesus asleep?” In another similar event on the sea of Galilee Jesus was absent from them. Why? It all makes sense in the metanarrative! “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. ”
You walk and run and drive each day through a complicated maze of activities. We can’t always see the reason for this turn or that time of sickness. When tragedy or disappointment strikes, it’s not without a reason and it always, lovingly fits the metanarrative.
One final thought I will share with you from Psalm 92 (one of our recent readings from the Bible Challenge). Each moment of our seemingly isolated life will one day show itself to be a part of a grander vision. He is planting us and causing us to flourish. The strain of life and the chaos of confusing turns or unexpected delays only adds to what He is accomplishing in us: fruit.
“The righteous flourish like the palm tree
and grow like a cedar in Lebanon.
13 They are planted in the house of the LORD;
they flourish in the courts of our God.
14 They still bear fruit in old age;
they are ever full of sap and green,
15 to declare that the LORD is upright;
he is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him”
Your narrative will be a declaration of His faithfulness and His righteousness; His blood covers you - of course He cares. His greatest love is you - why else would He call you as a member of the Church, His Bride! You are planted . . . in the metanarrative of Life forever with Jesus!