In Life’s Movies, YOU are NOT ALWAYS the STAR!!!
As a writer, I look at life a bit differently than most folks. For example – – if you ask most people if they would like to go through life with no conflict whatsoever they would, I’m sure!, immediately jump at the opportunity! Me, however, maybe not so much!
I realize that you may be thinking, “Floyder, what the smash is wrong with you! You mean you like it when folks yell at you and get all up in your face?” The answer, of course, is absolutely not! One of the main issues here is the fact that we, as a society, have made “conflict” and “confrontation” synonymous when, in reality, they aren’t!
Down through the eons of time in the literary world there have been three kinds of conflict:
- Man against Nature
- Man against Self
- Man against Man
More recently, in the past 200 years or so, we have added a fourth category:
- Man against Machine
With the advent of computers and AI, this last one may eventually prove to be the bane of society, but that’s fodder for another day!
So, getting back on track, we were talking about the fact that I, as a writer, may not want to live a conflict free life! To understand this, I must enlighten you to the two most basic axioms a writer must live by, especially a writer of Fiction:
- Stories are about People
- Stories Without Conflict are Boring
Now, let’s take my original question (“Would you like to live a conflict free life?), and ask it another way: “Would you like to live a boring life?” You see, when you get right down to it, the equivalent of a conflict free life is a boring life! All of a sudden, my question isn’t such a simple one, is it? At this point we need to look at our title (In Life’s Movies, YOU are NOT ALWAYS the STAR!!!) and look at some of the “conflict” in our lives and realize that, just maybe, it isn’t “all about me!”
I’ll give you a personal example, just so we have a basis for our discussion. This morning, I woke up to discover we had a flat tire on the car. The first thing we did was to speak Favor over our Finances, the Tire, and the Dealership we were going to take the tire to to get it repaired, per Pastor Rowdy Van Horn’s sermon (ONE CHURCH SCOTTSDALE, Sunday, 11/3/19). Next, we called AAA and then our HONDA Dealership where we had purchased the tire!
Long story short – we got a brand new tire for free, and all it cost me was about 2 hours of my time!
Now, on the surface, there was no good reason for us to have experienced this inconvenience. That, of course, is assuming that we were the “Stars” of today’s fiasco. However, maybe we weren’t! Maybe the “Star” was the AAA technician who came to the house to change the tire and was especially Blessed by the tip I gave him; maybe the “Star” was the HONDA Customer Service Rep who assisted me, and might only need one more positive Customer Service Survey to get a bonus, raise, or even promotion!
The GOOD NEWS is that while I don’t know WHY I was inconvenienced this morning, I do know Romans 8:28, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” So … since we see little or no good in what happened for us, there must have been some good in it for someone, and we need to Praise God that he chose us to help Him fulfill this “good” in that other person’s life!