For years I thought God was very inefficient. I had heard all my life that the Bible was a guidebook for life. It seemed to me that God could have saved a lot on paper and printing and reading time if he’d just sifted out the important bits like “God is good. He’s powerful.” and put them down in a couple of chapters of bullet points. The speed reader’s guide to God. It’s ironic that I thought that because the dream of my life has always been to be a writer and to tell stories. Stories are what breathe life into theories and bullet points. Bullet points are fine, but stories are the way God really shows us how he works. We learn very early on how to tell stories. We start by introducing the setting and the characters. Then we add a complication and we follow the development of the characters through to the resolution. And then of course, everyone lives happily ever after. Actually – that’s my son James’ favourite bit of any story. If you had read the Bible from the beginning to the book of Judges, you would think you were about to hit the ‘happily ever after’ bit.