who is the main character of your life?
Have you ever stopped and considered who is the main character of your life? That’s easy, we think: it’s me! Who else would be after all? And so we go through life assuming that we're the lead actor in our personal movie, with the people around us ranging from extras to supporting actors, there to advance our story and ensure we have a happy ending.
As the main character of our movie, we also serve as the director, since we believe we have the perfect vision for what our life movie should look like. This causes us to tell everyone around us how they should act and what roles they should play to make our movie perfect.
We then see God as the producer. He hovers somewhere off the set, in charge of securing the financing and making sure everything goes according to our schedule. We don’t want his hands-on help with our movie, though, since he doesn’t get our creative vision for what we’re trying to do with our lives, after all.
Whether it’s through social media or pop psychology, we’re told to confidently take charge of our personal narrative and make sure that we are following our passions and prioritizing our dreams, hopefully in a way that gets us more status, attention, and eyeballs on our lives.
And if our life movie goes well, we hopefully find the right supporting cast (spouse and close friends), who will help us look good and give us a perfect Hollywood ending, making us feel like Joseph Gordon Levitt when he dances down the sidewalk in 500 Days of Summer to Hall and Oates.
But while this is attractive at first, it’s a disastrous way to approach life. When everyone tries to be the main character of this movie called life, we get into power struggles and conflict with the people around us. We're upset that they want to be the hero of their movie and refuse to play a supporting role in ours. And they’re upset that we want to be the hero of our own movie and refuse to play a supporting role in theirs.
This approach also creates so much fear and pressure. Since our lives are unpredictable, we're always anxious about whether they will follow our script: "Is my perfect ending going to happen? Am I going to get the guy/girl? Am I going to be the hero?” And this makes us so afraid of the movie going "off script," that we spend more time thinking about how our movie is going than actually living life.
But if we want to live well, we have to admit that we're not the lead actor in our lives and turn that role over to Jesus. Our lives are not about being the main character of our own story, but rather about participating in God's story: that through Jesus Christ, God has rescued us from our sin and is working to make all things new, culminating in the new heavens and new earth.
We'll never flourish to the degree God intended until we recognize that our lives shouldn't revolve around our dreams, agenda, and desires, but rather God's will for our lives. When we do this, we're set free from a role we can't play, being the main character of the universe, and instead can use our lives the way we were meant to: to bring glory to God.
You have to admit that you don't have what it takes to be the main character of the universe and instead be willing to become a supporting actor in God's great drama: the reconciliation of the universe to himself through his Son. While that sounds like death to our attention-seeking selves, it's the only way to be set free into the life that you were meant to live.
And Jesus said to them, "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it.
