God, the hero of all my stories
Every story has a hero. The hero guides the story and is changed by the story. Whether the hero chosen by the author is dashing and competent or plain and bumbling, the reader needs to make a connection with him or her to persevere with the hero’s journey. Through facing and overcoming a series of obstacles, the hero triumphs over adversity (or the adversary). An alternative ending is that the hero loses, yet realises that defeat is in fact, some measure of success.
After I finished writing my first novel, a memoir entitled Fingerprints of Grace, it struck me that God was the hero of the story. When I began writing, the heroine seemed to be our daughter, Hannah Grace, who battled a rare condition called Leigh disease and died when she was two-and-a-half years old. Yet it was clear on finishing the book that God was the hero of the story. Although he allowed the heroine to die, he swept her up in his arms and carried her to an eternity of well-being in heaven. In addition, throughout the journey, he scattered countless moments of grace in our path.
I decided that ‘God, the hero of all my stories’, would be the motto for my writing life. In some forms of writing, this is explicit, such as the sermons and magazine articles I write for The Salvation Army. In other forms of writing I do, such as fictional stories and poems, it may be implicit. In these cases, God speaks sotto voce through themes such as faith, justice and love woven through the story. In all cases, God is the hero, as Christ is in history.
