Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture My husband is driving me crazy! My kids are making me batty! My boss is driving me up the wall! This church is enough to try the patience of a saint! If one more person asks me to do one more thing, I’m going to lose my mind! Is any of this sounding slightly familiar??? Of course, you’ve never said any of those things, but you have a distant cousin in another state... What’s that? You’ve uttered every one of those lines in the last week? I can relate. Many authors conduct extensive research before writing a book. Alas, no research was required for this one. All I had to do was write the truth about my own life and voila: the raw material for a future Major Motion Picture was born. I used to think my problems were making me crazy. But then I realized I had it backwards: my craziness was making the problems! For reasons we shall soon explore, like many women I tended to blow my problems all out of proportion. I could turn the slightest inconvenience, like losing my car keys, into an ordeal. If someone so much as hurt my feelings, I expected Oliver Stone to turn up at any moment, demanding the story rights. My three favorite pastimes were: 1. Thinking about how awful my life was 2. Telling everyone who got within a mile of me how awful my life had been and 3. Wondering why I didn’t have any friends If those are among your favorite pastimes, too, God has provided a way of escape: putting your problems into perspective. Here’s how the Bible puts it: "Pursue the things over which Christ presides. Don't shuffle along, eyes to the ground, absorbed with the things right in front of you. Look up, and be alert to what is going on around Christ-that's where the action is. See things from his perspective.” Col.3:2 Perspective is a powerful thing. As Rick Warren put it: “Your perspective will influence how you invest your time, spend your money, use your talents and value your relationships.” According to the dictionary, perspective is “the art of giving due diminution to the strength of light, shade and colors of objects, according to their distances and the quantity of light falling on them, and to the medium through which they are seen.” (try some other dictionaries, but keep the concept of color, distance and light) That’s what I hope to provide in this book: an opportunity to turn your Major Motion Picture into something beautiful by putting some distance between you and your problems. By enabling you to take a step back and look at your life from a different point of view. You may even realize that your situation is not quite so black-and-white as you originally thought. But the real key is found in shedding the light of God’s truth upon your life. As Christians, we know God is a Redeemer. That’s another way of saying he can take a worthless situation and create something good out of it. Sometimes it takes awhile, though. Nearly a decade ago, a friend and I drove three hours (roundtrip) to visit a living history museum. Can I be honest? It was so boring we both felt we’d wasted our time and money. Until last year, when I realized that trip was priceless. God had planted a seed of truth in my heart that day, but it took years of watering and quiet cultivation before it finally saw the light of day. Let me tell you, when it finally broke through, I was singing the Hallelujah Chorus. Now about that seed. My friend and I were apparently the only people touring the history museum that day, but being good sports, they decided to proceed with “the show” anyway. So there we sat, the only audience members, when a young man came out from behind the curtain and announced that their small troupe of performers were about to re-create an authentic 19th Century art-form called the Melodrama. As the show proceeded, I remember feeling embarrassed for the actors and actresses, since the play was absolutely preposterous. I should have been embarrassed for my ignorance, because they had, indeed, accurately re- created a 19th Century Melodrama. What exactly is a Melodrama? Well, the phrase originates from the words “music drama” because music was used to accentuate the already over-the-top actions and emotions of the actors and actresses. Every character was one-dimensional: the villain was entirely villainous; the heroine was a powerless victim awaiting rescue; and the hero, who arrived just in the knick of time, was entirely good. Everything was black and white. No shades of gray let alone various colors of the rainbow. As I began to ponder this lost art form, a voice whispered in my ear, “Does that sound like anyone you know, Donna?” Let’s see: a one-dimensional universe featuring an entirely villainous villain and a powerless victim awaiting rescue by the perfect man. Uh-oh. The still, small voice continued: “Remember how ridiculous you thought the actors in the play looked?” Yes, I remembered. “That’s how you look, child. All the world is not your personal stage and you are not a player upon it. You’ve wasted enough years on your melodramas. Come, follow me, and I will give you rest for your weary soul.” My dear sisters, you will search the Bible in vain for Melodrama. I know. I’ve looked. It’s not in there. God’s not into melodrama. He’s into honesty and reality. That’s why every character on every page is portrayed in a multi-dimensional fashion, faults and all. Over and over again, God clearly shows us that in almost every single case, people played a role—however small—in creating their own problems. We’ll be looking at such real-life examples throughout Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture, in hopes that we will discover that maybe, just maybe, we too have played a small role in creating our own problems. Our best hope for a brighter future is in learning how to turn our melodramas into “mellow dramas.” It’s my earnest prayer that this book will enable you to gain a broader perspective on your own life and your place in this world. I want you to discover what I’ve discovered by God’s grace: that it really is possible to respond to your problems with calm and confidence, rather than reacting as if every moment is a major drama. Yes, it’s true. Other people have contributed to your problems, too. Yes, there are reasons why you are the way you are, but you can change. And only you can make those changes. You are not a performer on a grand stage called Planet Earth nor are you a paid actress in a prescribed script with no choice but to play out the destiny determined in advance for you. You’re not a helpless victim of circumstances. You are a human being, made in the image of Almighty God. You are capable of rising above anything that comes your way by the transforming power of His Holy Spirit at work within you. |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
