True Son: The Power of Story

By Eugene C. Scott
God gave me a vivid imagination and a deep love for stories.  With a mere turn of a page and flick of a neuron I have always been able to transport myself into another world, especially in times of difficulty.
A novel called “The Light in the Forest” by Conrad Richter, set in the Pennsylvania wilderness in the 1700s, carried me through the excruciating year following my father’s death.  In my imagination, I fought with my grief and ran the forest with True Son as he too struggled with his emotions and decisions while facing the loss of his Lenni Lenape family.
True Son’s real name was John Cameron Butler before he was taken from his Pennsylvania farm in a raid by the Lenni Lenape Indians. He is adopted and loved by the chief and after eleven years does not remember his former life and has become True Son. Suddenly, as a teen, a treaty forces True Son’s Lenni Lenape father to send him back to the Butlers.  In the loss of True Son’s father is where I connected with True Son.
Reading that story, I learned so much about myself–how fragile I was and how powerful my emotions.  How much I needed a father.
I didn’t know anything about God at the time, but that did not stop God–a few years later–from using that story to call me to see Jesus as the archetypal True Son and to trust God as my True Father.  I began to yearn for a Father who loved as did True Son’s.  This was the seed God planted in my heart and imagination to adopt me and show his love for me a few years later.  That day in my history reached beyond my wildest imagination.
If God can do all that through a fictional story, imagine what he can do through the better story of the True Son, Jesus.  Last year God used story and my imagination to dig even deeper into my soul.
Beginning with Monday, I read what took place in the life of Jesus that particular day of Holy Week.  I imagined myself there.  I imagined how I would feel and respond as Jesus purposefully walked toward his painful death.  I called it “this day in history” and it brought me a deeper understanding of who Jesus is and who he wants me to become.
This year I am writing a brief story each day about a fictional character who witnessed this day in history and what Jesus did on that day.  My hope is that this will help me, us, relive the truth of what Jesus did for us and how he loves us.
I will publish these at http://ecscott.wordpress.com and at  http://bibleconversation.wordpress.com.  Please feel free to join the story.  Also, click here for a Harmony of the Events of Holy Week.  It will lead you to readings from the Gospels that depict what Jesus did and said this day in history.  May God bring you closer to the True Son using your imagination and his better story this week.