I LOVE stories! Whether it be in books, movies, or TV shows, I love getting invested in the characters’ lives and stories. For me, reading or watching these stories is almost like an escape from the busyness and craziness of my life.
My favorite types of stories are mysteries and crime dramas. Whodunits always have me on the edge of my seat and my mind scrambling to decipher the clues and discover who the criminal is. If a story has a mystery to figure out, a crime to solve, or a bad guy to catch, I’m interested!
You may not love mysteries and crime dramas like I do, but you probably do have some other book or movie genre that you enjoy and keeps you interested in the story. In whatever stories you read and watch, there’s likely some twists and turns or conflicts that keep you engaged. And while we love these twists and turns in others’ stories, we hate them in our own.
What’s your story? Maybe it’s pretty simple. You went to college. You got married. You had a couple kids. Nothing big or dramatic has happened in your life. But others of you intimately know what those plot twists really feel like. Life was going fine for you, that is until your husband came home demanding a divorce, or until you realized you couldn’t afford your groceries, or until you faced a life-altering injury or illness, or until someone hurt you with a seemingly unforgivable sin. We love plot twists in movies or books, but we dread them in our own lives.
And these plot twists can cause us to question God. Why is He letting these bad things happen to me? Where is He in this tragedy? God, what did I do to deserve this? The twists and turns we experience may make life seem bleak and cause us to lose trust in God. But we still have hope, and this is what Nancy and Robert Wolgemuth talk about in their book You Can Trust God to Write Your Story. As the title suggests, you CAN trust God to write your story because it is actually a part of His bigger story.
“Situations that seem confusing and chaotic to us are actually plot threads He is weaving together to create a story… a beautiful, compelling work of art.” (1)
In this book, the Wolgemuths tell story after story of real people’s plot twists and how they discovered God’s sovereignty and faithfulness in their lives. Whether their marriage was in trouble or they couldn’t find anyone to marry, whether they lacked money or they lacked good health, whether they lost someone close to them or they were facing death themselves, they always recognized that they could trust God to write the rest of their stories.
As I mentioned earlier, I love stories, so I loved getting the chance to be invited into the lives and stories of the authors, several Bible characters, and other real people who have embraced the providence of God. Each and every chapter, each and every story reminded me that
“He is good. He is faithful. And you can trust Him to write your story.” (1)
(I received this book from Moody Publishers in exchange for an honest review.)
- Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth and Robert Wolgemuth, You Can Trust God to Write Your Story: Embracing the Mysteries of Providence (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2019), 20 & 35.
