When I was around five or six, just getting proficient in reading and writing, I made my own books—I crayoned the words onto paper and then drew the pictures to go along with them. I did not make up my own stories, though. I borrowed other stories, maybe my favorite character from my favorite movie. Sometimes I would even feature one of my siblings as the main character. Afterwards I would staple the pages together and run to show my mother the book I had made.
There is one book in particular, which I still have. I wrote it on the way home from an especially exciting family vacation. The vacation itself had played out like a story—my parents had not told us where we were going; we had just hopped into the car and started driving. I remember passing over some train tracks and missing the turn to Grandma’s house—our destination must be very far away indeed, I thought. As we left all the familiar places behind, one by one, our final destination was left to my imagination. But the moment I saw the green-blue shimmer of the ocean, I realized the true excitement was only just beginning. Fine, sugar-white sand dazzled in the Alabaman sun—a seemingly perfect setting for an imaginative six-year-old author. The curious thing was, when I opened my box of crayons to start retelling the story, I did not tell it exactly how it happened. I knew most stories were a little bit different from the real events, so I decided I would be more like a real author if I changed a few things.

When God created the universe and everything in it, he created mankind in his image and after his likeness. We are the only beings God created like that. We are the only created beings in the universe who can admire beauty, who can make a coherent story out of the most trivial events, and create fictional worlds based on our imaginings. We are the only created beings who might look at a delicious-smelling apple tree and start imagining an ancient warlock, banned from using magic, infusing the last drops of his power into an apple seed and planting it.
We all are driven to create something out of nothing, to take a pile of dust and breathe life into it. We like to string together seemingly random happenings and memories. We want there to be connections between parts of our lives, and for every little event to have some sort of meaning in the end. For “The End,” naturally, is where most stories are ultimately headed. Sometimes we still question whether our story will really have an end or not.
We all tell stories. Not all of them are true. We sit around the campfire and spin tales so far-fetched, no one believes them for a moment, and yet our audience sits in spellbound silence until the end. We relive our past by telling pieces of it to our children or peers—either that, or there is some part of it we want to hide, and we make up something false. Either way, we are telling a story. And like our Creator, we want to be original. We each interpret events in our own unique way and sometimes change the order of events or add details that are not completely true. We portray things the way we want them portrayed.
Children especially tend to take creative liberties. Oftentimes a book written by a child is far more insightful than a book written by an adult. Children do not feel the need to hide their worldviews, nor are they afraid to be seen as imitators. While most children have not developed complex worldviews, they see the world in a unique way that is lost once they grow up. We can see it in the way a child draws the sky floating above the ground. It is obvious by the way they try to copy the smiley-face-shaped eyelids they have seen in cartoons.
There are little moments in our lives where we feel like we must be in a story—when we wish we could rewrite small details of our lives (as if we could do a better job), when we find ourselves holding on to the tiniest of trinkets, even the broken ones that trigger both delightful and painful memories, when we miss a familiar turn and end up in an even grander place. We all sense moments of divine interference from time to time. The notion of some celestial Fate presiding over our lives is appealing because it implies a reason for everything. The idea that life is orchestrated by an author-like being gives us assurance that everything is somehow connected, that our life is uniquely connected to every other human life; there is a reason we are all here, right now.
As humans, we have the unique ability to admire the way the seafoam gathers where the water meets the sand; we can feel the soft pull of the current around our hips as we inch farther out into the gulf, and we can choose either to walk over the sharp seashells threatening to cut the soles of our feet, or take caution and steer away from them altogether. We can watch one small journey from our childhood turn into an ongoing legacy, never to be forgotten. We can choose to take long walks down the beach with our dad to see the fancy green house sitting all by itself, or we can choose to relax where we are and never see the things that lie further down the beach or peek into the windows of the mysterious green house.