RoboPreacher

tell me you love me anyway The conclusion of the Joseph family saga : Today’s passage is the very end of the lovely Joseph saga . I commend it to you, Genesis 37 through 50. I’d like to read the entire story, but we’d run out of time.   So this passage might land the punch it packs, though, I’d like to give you a general idea of this story’s overall shape. To do that, I’d like to lead you through a little exercise. This is borrowed straight from the author, Kurt Vonnegut. You can YouTube his “shape of story” lecture .   He does this thing where he charts stories on a simple graph. The horizontal axis has a “B” on the left end and an “E” on the right , for Beginning and End. The vertical axis has a “G” at the top and an “I” at the bottom , for Good fortune and Ill fortune.   Now, Vonnegut works through this exercise to illustrate how most stories have the same trajectory, and nearly always lie . They presume to know more about life than we actually do.   If yo...

all the work of my hands Three basic story shapes: Vertical Axis, Good/Bad (G/B). And horizontal Axis, Start/End (S/E) 1) Rags to riches (Princess and the pea) Climbs G/B Axis 2) Just Desserts (Icarus) Descends G/B Axis 3) Most Common ( action , romcoms , sports , hero ) First descends G/B Axis, then climbs back up The problem with these shapes, though, is assumes we know more than we really do… Because often what looks Good, turns out to be BAD; and what looks Bad, turns out to be GOOD! Doesn’t it? Real life confirms this. Something of a comfort to see this played out throughout the Bible! We’re in the third chapter of Ruth today, but this whole book is great . And , at a nice, tidy four chapters, it’s manageable. So, let’s take a look at its shape : First ; Ruth begins noting this story takes place in the time of the Judges .   In fact, Ruth comes after the book of Judges! (Nice, huh?) And Judges...