Life is made up of stories. Short stories. Almost missed stories. Stories that have been edited out of consciousness. Forgotten. Stored away like so many snapshots, in a trunk in the attic. Some make us smile wistful, silent smiles. Some stories make us slap our thighs and roar with laughter till our sides hurt; they are stories that beg to be told over and over again. Some terrify and shame us, and seal our lips. Some stories are incomprehensible, and seem not to fit into what we have planned for our larger lives. And most of the stories that really matter are the ones from inner space -- the ones from deep within our souls. The stories in this book may not hang together, or fit in the order you might expect. They may not be the stories you would expect to hear from a "Pentecostal-preacher-type" or one who poses as a "sanctified scholar" of sorts. No matter. Stories do not always tell themselves in correct order, nor choose their casts predictably. Not in real life. "Knights in shining armor, love and marriage, a baby carriage and happily ever after" may not be your story. Or mine. Nevertheless, within each life are valuable, sterling short stories. They are not always immediately dramatic or at first, soul stopping. They often are the interjections, the snapshots in which God inserts God's self amid the clutter and then waits. It takes getting older to fine the yearn to thread and piece together each short story, and to see what God has been writing. Composing a life. The outrageous waste of this life is in thinking the only stories that matter are the stories about dead people. Or the stories we read about in the Bible. Or in a novel. Or in a history book. And little do we celebrate the precious worth of the one short story we are living this day. Never judge your short story by its brightness or its bitterness until the whole tale has been told. The real story. The one written and read from within. One storyteller put it this way: "It does not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that when He shall appear -- when the whole story unfolds --we shall be like Him."
