“You have a crucial role to play. That is the third essential truth spoken by every great story, and it happens to be the one we most desperately need if we are ever to understand our days. Frodo underestimated who he was. As did Neo. As did Wallace. As did Peter, James, and John. It is a dangerous thing to underestimate your role in the Story. You will lose heart, and you will miss your cues.” (Epic)
kay, this we now know – Life is a Story. Not a math problem. Not some survival contest. A Story.
“Then what is my role to play?”
That’s one of the most important questions we could ever ask. You’re here, after all. Why? What is the reason for your existence? What did God mean when he meant you? What were his intentions when he placed you on this earth, in the situation you are in, at this moment in the Story? Finding that is like finding the secret to your life.
But our role in the Larger Story is something we must discover. “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter,” says the book of Proverbs, “to search out a matter is the glory of kings” (25:2).
We must search for it, like buried treasure. Now, to help you start searching in the right location, we must tell you that God writes the meaning of our life in a most surprising place – in our hearts. That’s right. The destiny of your life is written in the desires of your heart. Unearthing those desires and deciphering them is our task, with the help of God’s spirit, and counsel from the friends of God.
Now, to be clear, you are living out a sort of script right now. But most of us are playing a part handed to us by someone else. We’re a doctor or a teacher or a homemaker because that’s what our parents wanted us to be. Or its what we just sort of fell into. But is it the desire of your heart? Is it the fulfillment of your deepest dreams?
Oftentimes, before we can discover what role we are to play, we have to face with honesty the role we are playing now, and how we came to play it. We must admit the false self we are living, in order to set it aside for the true self, the person God created us to be. To that end we recommend Allender’s To Be Told, and Eldredge’s The Sacred Romance (see below).
As we step away from the identity handed to us by others, we begin to learn a new identity, one given to us by our God. Toward that end we offer a few excerpts from John’s other books:
Finally, we begin to listen to our heart’s desires. That can be a difficult process, and sometimes a painful one. But it is vital to the journey of our heart, and the discovery of that role which is ours alone to play.
There are the deep desires that are unique to each person. It takes time and effort to unearth those desires, and decipher them in such a way as to guide us into our true role, our destiny.
To that end, we recommend The Journey of Desire and its workbook.
Of course, as John said in Epic, the only one who can ever truly reveal to us our role in the story is the Author himself. In all your searching, you’ll want to keep asking him, “God, what is my role to play? What have you created me to be, and to do? What have you written on my heart?” Oftentimes he’ll respond with questions that take you deeper, questions like, “Tell me what you love,” and, “Who are the characters in the stories that you love that you would want to be?” He sheds more light on our search as we seek his help.
For Further Reading
To Be Told, by Dan Allender. (coming 2005)
- Dan is a very wise and insightful counselor who has spent his life helping people understand their story, and find one worth living in. We think this is his best book yet. (A workbook is planned for it, as well. Get it when it comes out!).
The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho
- A delightful fable of one boy’s journey to find his “personal legend.” Part Christian, part Muslim, the story shimmers with truths about what its like to take this journey in search of your role in the Story.
- This is John’s first book written with his dear friend Brent. It helps us explore the story of our own lives, and especially why we lost heart along the way as we sought to find the Romance but experienced instead the Arrows. It’s a beautiful look into the Great Love Story – God’s passionate pursuit of our hearts.
- When a man loses heart he loses himself. He cannot find The Battle to Fight, The Adventure to Live, nor The Beauty to Rescue that every man longs to find. (Look at the games little boys play. Look at the movies men love. You’ll see it's true). Eldredge helps men recover those desires by recovering that unique and powerful masculine soul given to them by God.
- The heart of a woman is a place of deep beauty and deep mystery, and a place long misunderstood by the world. If you’ll look at the games little girls play, and the movies women love, you’ll find every woman longs To Be Romanced, To Play an Irreplaceable Role in a Great Adventure, and to Unveil Beauty. The wounds of her life lie in these deep desires, and the recovery of her heart depends upon them as well.
- How we handle desire might be the most delicate and dangerous issue of our life. For how we handle our deep desires is how we handle our heart. There are few guides out there to help you handle your desires well – discover them, listen to them, follow them carefully towards your destiny. This is one of them.
- The companion workbook, designed to help you take the journey towards the discovery and fulfillment of your heart’s desires.
