But when I tell you that my flight was just a few days after the Pro Bowl, it makes sense doesn’t it? Of course there would be a lot of NFL players on the flight because there were a lot of NFL players in town. Just a few days earlier, I was eating lunch with a friend and we ran into Ndamukong Suh, who at the time played for my favorite team, the Detroit Lions (save your jokes, because this is our year! Maybe.).
Once you understand the bigger picture of what was going on in the world and in Hawaii that week, you can understand why there were so many NFL players on the flight. It wasn’t that unusual; in fact, it made a lot of sense when I thought about it. And while I was a little worried about the weight distribution of so many men over 250 lbs. on one flight, we made it to San Francisco just fine.
As I was reflecting later, I realized that my experience on the flight was not that different from the way we should interpret the events of our lives. You see, unless we understand the broader context of God’s plan in history, we won’t be able to make sense of all of the individual pieces of our lives. This might sound like Christianity 101 to some of us, but the story of the Bible and the story of our lives need to line up.
If you believe that the story of the universe is a story of random and unguided expansion, evolution, and eventual collapse, that will shape the way you make sense of everything from marriage to money. If you believe that creation and time itself are cyclical with no beginning and no end, this will affect the way you think about life and death. And if you believe that the arc of history is creation, fall, redemption, and new creation, then the way you live ought to be shaped by this great story.
Seeing this clearly requires that we learn to read the progressive story of God’s redemption and tracing the many themes that all point us to Jesus throughout the Bible. If you were at our “Biggest Story” movie night last week, you got a little taste of this. But the truth is, we are mapping all of life and reality to this big story every day in our classrooms at Trinity. All of our lives are part of the biggest story.
Sometimes our lives don’t seem to make a lot of sense. However, when we connect them to the ongoing story of of God’s plan for history and redemption, we might not get all the answers we’d like, but more often than not, we get a lot more clarity. When we talk about living with a Christian worldview, we are talking about living in a story. And here at Trinity, we want to let the story of the Bible and the centrality of Christ shape that story every day.