every bitter thing is sweet. by sara hagarty
from sara's blog....
"Hey you, the one with a neat and tidy life that seems to be slipping through your fingers (the one who cringes at the thought of walking through what I describe),
Might the person you’re resenting or the circumstance that seems to be dragging you away from the life you’ve patterned be the very thing you need?
That son, that wife, that husband — that child you adopted — could it be they’re stationed, purposefully? Yup, right in their mess. Your mess. Could the end of “neat and tidy” be the beginning of passion and the pursuit of Him you’ve secretly always wanted but has evaded you whenever you’ve tried it on? Are you dragging a dustpan to the parts of your life that are mess — when He’s whispering in the background “this may be the greatest turning point in your story”? Find Me here.
Can I say it again? This may be the greatest turning point in your story."
I LOVE THE TURNING POINT IN A STORY!!!! in theatre class we have a fancy smancy theatre word for that point... it is PERIPETEIA. from the greek word "reversal". the thing is that the turning point (especially in greek drama) means that EVERYTHING changes. i have had a lot of PERIPETEIA moments in the last few years. seems that teenagers, kids moving out, going back to work... those things all mean TURNING POINTS in our stories. and as donald miller says in a million miles in a thousand years (really, have you read this book? because i have mentioned in a million times in a few blog posts...)
“And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can't go back to being normal; you can't go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time.”
nd this one by the donald also...
“If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation. If I got any comfort as I set out on my first story, it was that in nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He's a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn't change, the story hasn't happened yet. And if story is derived from real life, if story is just condensed version of life then life itself may be designed to change us so that we evolve from one kind of person to another. ”
i want my story to change me. i don't want to be the same person year after year. and it is really God's ultimate peripeteia reversal that the bitterest parts of our story end up being the sweetest parts as well.