Today Matters – Write Your Story

(This post is a transcript of my Youtube Video. Click above or read on!)

Hey Everybody! Todd here.

I just had a real quick thought while sitting in my office. I was thinking about your life and my life, and that’s how the bigness of it all.

We have these grand plans, and we look back, we think, “oh my goodness, my plans didn’t work out!” Many of you know that I’m an author. I write books. (The last couple of years, I haven’t written, but I’m going to be getting back into it this next year.)

As I wrote the fiction book called “Rosemont,” I realized an interesting process. I started writing with a general idea of what this book was going to be about – what the story was going to be. (In fact, I woke up in the middle of the night, and the idea came to me.)

As I started writing this fiction book, with every keystroke, the story reveals itself. You don’t write the story. The story ends up writing itself. People in the story revealed themselves to me as I was writing. I had no idea that certain characters were waiting in the wings for me to discover them as the story unfolded.

It was just a fantastic thing!

It dawned on me that I write letters that lead to words that lead to sentences that lead to paragraphs that lead to pages that lead to chapters and, ultimately, to the story’s unveiling.

Your life is like that as well.

You have a general idea as to the goal of your life. For example, many of us think in “x” number of years, I’m going to retire on a beach, sip little fruity drinks with umbrellas in them. Yet very few people have that kind of retirement. Like story writing, we have a general sense of how we want our lives to work out, but it’s just like writing the story. We don’t see the end of our story until we look back.

This morning, what this revealed to me as I was thinking about my book “Rosemont” and other books that I’ve written is this: regarding my life, I need to emphasize today.

I’m kind of the guy that is always thinking about next week, next month, next year, ten years from now. I live in those kinds of ideas. However, it matters what word I write today; what sentence I write today. It leads into the paragraph of this week, which leads him to the page of this month, which leads into the chapter of this quarter. Those chapters, then, are combined, and all of a sudden, at the end of the year, I look back and say, “Oh my goodness! This is how my story revealed itself to me!”

To be sure, I’m not a passive actor in the play of my life, but I also realize I’m ultimately not the director either. (Mixed metaphor, I know).

My encouragement for you today is to concentrate on a letter if you will. Focus on your word today, concentrate on what God has placed in front of you because ultimately, as Jordan Peterson says,

“You don’t have tomorrow but only what’s right in front of you. What you have to do right now is the most important thing.”

Jorden Peterson

So let your story write itself in you today. Let it reveal itself to you by being present in the moment and responding to the event in a God-centered way.

Peace!