Faith and Suspense: Living in the Middle of the Story

[Following is another excerpt from a book I’m finishing up, The Skeptical Believer: Telling Stories to Your Inner Atheist. (It will be available in January and I’ll probably post if for free on this website.) The italicized words WITHIN parentheses is the voice of my Inner Atheist, who comments freely throughout the book on what I say. Non-italicized material within parentheses is plain old me speaking.]

We are always coming in on something that is already going on.

Eugene Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant

Wait for the Lord;

be strong and courageous

and wait for the Lord.

Psalm 27:14

Living the story of faith is not unlike the experience of being halfway through a great novel. The scene has been set, the characters introduced, the central conflict identified. Characters are up to their eyeballs in some kind of trouble, usually with no clear or easy way out. Whether the novel is plot-driven, character-driven, or centering on clashing ideas, there is a “what happens next?” quality to even the most subtle stories. We call this “suspense,” and it is a quality that we find in our lives as well as in our novels.

We feel suspense even in stories that we have read or heard many times. There is an “unfolding in the present moment” quality to even the most ancient of stories. The story draws us into the scene being enacted once again in our presence. We are witnesses. Better yet, we are participants—because we listen and evaluate and judge and make decisions about people and events in the same way as the characters themselves. And we feel it all in our emotions and will and desires as much as or more than in our intellects.

And because we are not static characters ourselves, our sense of a story will change over time. Reading Huckleberry Finnor Jane Eyreas a twelve-year-old is not the same as reading them at twenty-five or fifty-five. None of the words have changed, but experientially it’s not the same story. I am different, and so the stories are different. This is why great stories—including the stories of the Bible—are never finished. They are filled with potential energy—as the term is used in physics—and they explode in our lives at unpredictable times and in unpredictable ways.

We are also in the midst of our own story. We literally do not know how it’s going to turn out. (I’ll tell you: Cold and dead, briefly remembered by others who will soon themselves be cold and dead.) We are not completely clear even about what has already happened. As an audience for our own story, we try to sort things out, evaluate, make judgments, come to some understanding of where we have been, where we are, and where we are headed. We experience suspense about our own story, wanting to know what it all means, what’s coming next, and where it will end. And, of course, we wonder about after the end.

That is where both you and I are at present. I am in the fourth quarter of my life. (Feeling a bit cold?) I grew up in fifteen different houses in eleven different towns in three different states (a restless father). A common denominator throughout was church and communities of faith (too many to count). I had good school teachers (four different ones in four different places in third grade) and a good education. I vowed to read books before I could even read, and I approached grade-school reading contests like an addict snorting cocaine. Books have been filling my head with thoughts and feelings ever since.

I married well (in every important sense), have raised four better-than-I-deserve children, and am now the old grandpa to a growing number of new votes for the importance of the future (that is, grandchildren). I taught literature for almost four decades, getting paid—modestly—for my addiction to books. (What a scam!)

And throughout it all, I have always wondered what it all means, what’s going to happen next, and how it will all end. And so have you.

We are all characters in our own story, and we have only a limited knowledge of what’s coming next. I find myself playing many different roles at the same time in my own story. I am narrator, character, audience, and critic. I find the tone of my narration alternately hopeful, doubtful, confused, engaged, detached, mournful, joyful, and bemused. As a critic and interpreter of my own story, I am sometimes harsh, but mostly grateful. I find connections between things that give me a sense of my life having a meaningful plot and the realistic hope of a desirable conclusion. Overall, I have a very strong sense that I am living a better story than I deserve.

Not everyone feels this way about their story. Some feel cheated, or put upon, or victimized, or tormented, or otherwise treated unfairly by life. Others feel they had good chances but have failed themselves and others. And a lot of people are just confused, uncertain, or not thinking about such things at all. One can find Skeptical Believers in all these categories and others.

We Skeptical Believers tend to want to know more and to know it sooner than life seems willing to grant. We want a story to prove itself before we commit to it. The questions are always in our heads, “But what if it isn’t true?” or “How can I know for sure?” or “What about the claims of competing stories?” In essence, we want to know how the story ends while we are still in the middle. Because knowing, for certain, the end would remove the tensions of the middle.

But I think that’s cheating, and it’s not an available option anyway. In reading a novel we often want to skip ahead to see how things are going to turn out, and some people do. I think doing so is a character flaw. Being willing to accept incomplete knowledge for a time is part of the implied contract between a storyteller and an audience. “I will tell you a story, but you are going to have to hear it in the way and at the pace that I tell it.” Skipping to the end is bad faith.

I think it’s much the same with the story God is telling you in your own life. We don’t know what’s next. We don’t even know for certain that we’re in a truthful story. And we wantto know. Yesterday, my three-year-old granddaughter Stella wanted something sweet to eat, but she had already had an ice cream cone not long before. When her mother said no, Stella replied with a drawn-out, plaintive cry against the universe, “But I want it!” She hasn’t figured out yet (as Ayn Rand never did) that the universe is at best only mildly interested in what she wants.

Some folks will say, “We doknow how it will turn out, because the Bible tells us how.” But that won’t help the Skeptical Believer much, because whether the Bible speaks accurately or not is precisely one of the issues. (See, you can be rational when you try.) And even for those of us who accept the Bible’s description of the ending, because we have accepted the risk of being in the story, knowing how things turn out in general does not answer pressing questions about how things will work out for us specifically, in the day-to-dayness of our own lives.

My advice is to accept (and even enjoy) the suspense of the faith story as one does in a good novel. Much has been revealed to us. More things will be revealed. Some things never will be. This is the human condition, and it does not disappear for believers—it simply occurs on a higher plane with more at stake. Rather than wondering what next random, arbitrary thing will happen to me and those I love (which is all the materialist can legitimately wonder), I ponder what will be the next development in this story God has been telling since time began and which God is telling me personally in the details of my own life.

Because there is another element in the implied agreement between storyteller and audience. And that is that the storyteller will not waste your time. The storyteller will tell a story worth hearing. God does not tell stories to pass the time, but to redeem the time. There is suspense in your story and mine, we would prefer to know now, but, as with all good stories, the ending is worth the wait.