If I have a hope, it's that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically, into the story, and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as though to say, enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you.

We were made to be distracted by life, by story.

God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me specifically into the story, and He put us in specifically with the sunsets in the rainstorms as though to say, Enjoy your place in My story, the very beauty of it means it's not about you, and in time that will give you comfort.

And once you know what it takes to live a better story, you don't have a choice. Not living a better story would be like deciding to die, deciding to walk around numb until you die, and it's not natural to want to die.

To know there is a better story for your life and to choose something other is like choosing to die.

You can call it God or a conscience, or you can dismiss it as that intuitive knowing we all have as human beings, as living storytellers; but there is a knowing I feel that guides me toward better stories, toward being a better character. I believe there is a writer outside ourselves, plotting a better story for us, interacting with us, even, and whispering a better story into our consciousness.

Stew Friedman at the Wharton School puts it, defining a "compelling image of an achievable future,"1 leaders captivate the imaginations of their audiences.

You put something on the page," he said. "Your life is a blank page. You write on it".

A good story takes a series of random events and distills them into the essence of what really matters.

Finally, when I finished rambling, he said, "Don, all relationships are teleological." I asked him what the word teleological meant. "It means they're going somewhere," Al said. "All relationships are living and alive and moving and becoming something.

I was creating someone I could live through, the person I'd be if I redrew the world.

A story starts with a hero who wants something. And then the question becomes: Will the hero get what she wants?