Each of us is a book, telling the story of grace, but we do not know this. It is good to take time to open your book. You turn the pages, identify the main themes and the central characters. You can ponder how to construct the chapters of your life that are still to come.

Yours is a unique story, a first edition. It is as yet incomplete – there are, you hope, plenty of blank pages ahead. But you may consider that your tale is pretty ordinary and dull. Your image of yourself may be of someone who plods along quietly and alone, and that no intelligent publisher would dream that your manuscript could become a best-seller.
But when you catch on to the fact that your text is co-authored, everything changes. You look back on the chapters written so far with a new interest. You begin to see what the ghost-writer – God! – has been up to. You discover that the story-line is incredibly rich. The plot got under way a long time ago, 13.7 billion years ago in fact, when the world was brought into being. This book will be no paperback, then, but a blockbuster.
Maybe you begin to get into the habit of consulting with your ghost-writer on how to construct the next chapter, and then the one after that. As you look further ahead, you come to see that the final chapter will be written posthumously, not by you but by God. Yet it won’t be simply a conclusion followed by a full stop. Instead, there will be a comma or semi-colon, which we call ‘death’ and then the plot will open out into exciting scenarios you could never have dreamed of. The chapters written so laboriously in this world will seem like a short introduction to the endless volumes about the life to come, and your role in it. The scenario will be unimaginably exciting, and the relationships you make will be totally satisfying.