I am a novelist. As the guy behind the pen, I have the superpower to create individual lives and stories and adventures out of thin air for personal rewards of passion and money. But I am careful. Doing things for passion and money can get one in trouble fast. French writer Ferenc Molnár said, “Writing is a bit like prostitution. First, I did it for my own pleasure. Then I did it for my friends. Now I do it for the money.”
As a writer I am delightfully aware that I write about characters that I create and into which I breathe life. As their creator, each of them is truly alive in that universe that genuinely exists between my ears. I can say with all honesty that I love my imaginary characters as passionately as I do my flesh and blood family – hence the wellspring of all that passion.
When children invent imaginary friends, they are given over to the care of a doctor. But when adults create imaginary friends, they are given a word processor, an IRS Tax Form 1099, a bank account and an editor.
When I am in the middle of writing a novel, as I have consistently been for decades, I am painfully aware that until I reach the end of the book, these characters are stuck in unfinished stories and can never know their destiny. Each of them stares across the page they are on today at a blank canvas just across the spine of the book. Over there across that great gulf of indeterminate time, they each literally see an empty space upon which tomorrow will someday appear and reveal their future – one event, one scene and one sequel at a time. On any given day, they are stuck in an unfinished story, not knowing what will happen on the very next page.
Sound familiar? It should. This describes the individual stories each day of our own lives. All of us represent stories of love, passion, fear, uncertainty, adventure and hope which are only partially written when the very next blank page unfailingly appears on the advent of each morning from somewhere out of the mists of time.
In our lives, we have willingly and enthusiastically absorbed the life adventure of 21st Century Templars, written on many of our life’s pages before today. The question is this: is the Templar story written large? It is an unmistakable part of our life’s chronicle, or is it merely a footnote? To be sure, it will be accounted for differently on the pages of each of our books.
But of a far greater significance, the Templar story for each of us is always still just a small part of the much longer and far deeper Christian story represented by lives that have been lived for the Eternal Kingdom.
For some of us reading this Battlefield Report, our stories will end relatively soon. For others, our stories will continue on for years or perhaps even decades ahead.
But sooner that we can even imagine, all our tales will wind up on the last page completed with the two final words of every story: THE END.
All your tales that will make up your story after the Great Author finally finishes your unique chronicle will certainly be opened one day and will be read aloud by your Creator.
But, have no fear! Out of His incomprehensible grace and love, He came to literally edit and clean up your life’s tale so that the story of your life will read flawlessly and magnificently. So much so that after THE END, your life will demand a sequel! And because the real HERO of your story and mine; the One Who actually penned the chronicle of your life is even far more magnificent, He will sovereignly order a long running series of sequels embedded in a destiny that will have no end at all.
So today, fellow Templar, keep in mind that today’s few pages of your adventure are only the very beginning, no matter how many pages remain on your Earth-bound calendar! For, “Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and which have not entered the human heart, all that God has prepared for those who love Him.”
1 Corinthians 2:9