welcome to the story.

I was thinking the other day . . . I was watching the Truman Show. That movie resonates on so many levels with me. To many levels to get into here. But the whole world of comfort and safety versus the world of the unknown and adventure. The pseudo-creator and the real Creator. The fact that Truman is trapped in this fake world where nothing is really important, meaningful, or real. Yet his life is important, meaningful, and real. His deep down desire for something more. Not to just escape, but to fully live. Again a lot of levels that I could sit on for a while. But I started thinking about the whole idea of improvising. I rather like the idea of improvising. To invent, compose, or perform with little or no preparation. Sometimes I feel like humanity has been improvising since the Fall. We messed it up. Dropped the ball. And started this whole downward spiral that we find ourselves in. And we've kind of been improvising ever since. God is restoring it all. He is slowly reversing the downward spiral. One day, this grand reversal will be fully realized. But until then . . . we improvise. We invent, we compose, we perform, we create, we dream, we live. I heard a church planter the other day say one of things that God gave us, one of things that resembles and is akin to his personality, is the ability to create. I believe God has made us co-creators with him, or maybe sub-creators. Granted, we'll never create anything with the grandeur and scale that he created with, but yet he still invites us to create. Nothing else has that capacity. Just us and God. To make things with our hands, to dream things with our minds. Thats why I love the arts so much. And thats why I think its so sad that the church doesn't place value on the arts. I think when we co-create with God, we are experiencing a high level of what we were supposed to be. The world has been thrown into flux. God lets us improvise with him. He invites us into the process of restoring things. Making things right. So he says, improvise . . . dream, create, compose, perform . . . improvise ways to restore things. In The Truman Show, Truman goes through some scenes where he begins to improvise. He begins to realize things aren't right. The people around him are tuned out to reality. They are blindly marching to a different script. So he improvises. He throws them off their game. He begins running wildly. Darting left then darting back to the right. Yelling. Jumping. Doing anything he can to snap them out of their preplanned lives. Doing anything he can to shake things up. He improvises. As I was watching the movie, I just kept thinking about how much he was improvising to get things going, to shake things up. Sometimes I think we need to shake things up. With our own lives, with those around us. We need to improvise. This isn't a violent shake-up. But its simply divine improvisation. Invent, dream, create, perform, conduct, live . . . ways that aren't expected. We're in this downward spiral. The quest now is to be a part of God's slow, gradual reversal as he restores all things to himself. How we do that, how we partner with God in that . . . well thats up to our improvisation.