Most of life is pretty mundane. Sometimes I find myself scouring my memory, searching for a story of some significant event. I dismiss some memories as being pretty ordinary. Many are not very interesting or comical, at least to the outsider. As the saying goes, sometimes you have to be there to appreciate it.
I admire those who write fiction. I have a number of favorites but Louis L’Amore had a talent for spinning a good story. You can easily tell the good guys from the villains. And, his stories draw you into the characters’ lives, making you feel like you’re right there. Fiction is supposed to fire the imagination and stimulate your senses. That’s easy to see these days with the current popularity of Biblical fiction on both the big and small screens. Hollywood screenwriters have taken bits and pieces of Biblical truths, applied fictional dialog and fictional story-lines to make history more entertaining, thus attraction viewers. Their motives may be good, but these films distort the facts.
True-to-life stories (history) do not necessarily lend themselves to engaging the imagination the way fiction can. People are continuing to drift away from the written word, searching to find new ways to get them to think or to be entertained. Television and other visual arts, are ways to accomplish that; then we have the Internet with fiction often masquerading as truth. Those venues, outside of vocal story-telling and writings, have the opposite effect. Instead of engaging the intellect, they tend to do all the work of the imagination for us. Rather than expanding the thought process, they force us to see the story, distorted by another person’s view.
Why would I focus on this? Our anniversary is coming up soon, so I thought I’d write about our courtship and wedding. If I were reading this I’d already be yawning, thinking about how dull it would be reading about someone else’s courtship. So, we’ll understand. We trust that you will see that God was at work in our lives during those days, ordering our steps, same as He is now, even though we chose not to acknowledge Him back then.
So, maybe they’re “The Greatest Story Ever Told”, like in the picture, but we do enjoy telling them. Anyway, much of it serves as a reminder for Olga and me of those events (history). We hope that it will draw you into a small portion of our lives. Perhaps along the way it may jog your own memories of how you got to where you are today.
“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”
