Literally nothing about any character in an author's story is outside the sovereign control of the author. And yet, when the author endows his characters with life, they stand up and begin speaking of their own accord.
"It is awfully easy to poke fun at ideas that sound like little more than backward, misinformed superstition. The first time you chuckle. The hundredth time you clinch your jaw to prevent yourself from saying what you really think." Then you stop and think about your own culture.
"I had no idea of what it'd take to catch those deeper glimpses of your fierce and fiery grace, your glory both blinding and warm, or what it'd cost." But now I know.
"You cannot buy this confidence, this freedom, this hope, this security." But someone can give it to you for free.
Kenny Anton recounts how a single event brought him to both the heights of joy and the depths of sorrow.
One day the illusion of random occurrence and meaninglessness will be rolled back, and we'll finally see that all details were carefully planned with a specific purpose.
She had a story to tell. It was the story of a God who raised both dead bodies and dead hope.
"It’s the unknown that always undoes me. But it’s the Unseen that holds me together. And that week, the Unseen was at work. I was loved back into the Light" (Deborah Farris).
"It was not born out of the sod / But from the very mind of God."
I love reading and writing stories because they have endings. Our story doesn't have an ending yet—at least not from our perspective. We're still slogging through the thick of it. We don't know what's coming up in the next chapter. All we can do is trust the Author, a Father who loves his children more than I would ever be capable of loving mine.