What you’re about to read is a little about the process I underwent with Shawn and Gavin to write a parable. It started with Shawn’s idea to have a door up in front on Sunday night. The idea behind the door was that it makes you wonder what’s behind it. In the same way Jesus parables only show the surface and you have to contemplate the rest. So he decided to have a door and talk about parables and the kingdom of heaven. Then I had the idea to have night where we sat around and discussed a parable in the way that followers of Jesus would have. Then I thought to get the full effect we would need to write our own parable. So thus began a long and crazy journey to create a parable.
So one day we were talking about the difference between people who get saved and go on with their lives, and then the people who go on to live for Jesus. In the first example you have someone who gets really excited and pumped about an event (getting saved) while the other person continues the journey forward. This gave me the idea for a parable where one couple gets married and lives life together to its fullest and grows in their relationship. The other couple would be all excited about the marriage but then that would be it. So I told the idea to Shawn and Gavin and we decided to sit down and expand on it.
Our first meeting lasted three hours. In it, we were all over the place and decided to analyze one of Jesus parables. We soon realized that it was going to be a very hard undertaking because Jesus parables were both perfect and brilliant. We tried our best and decided to create the last sentence first… the moral of the story. Then we went to the beginning and wrote the first sentence. So after all this work and planning we now had two sentences: the first and the last. So needless to say we had a lot of work to do.
The second meeting lasted for around three hours also and we were all over the place. Ultimately we ended up talking about The Land Before Time XXIII (The Land After Time) in which you see nothing but a glacier for the first fifteen minutes… until *swish* a penguin slides by… (That probably made no sence to you, but trust me… I was laughing a good ten minutes after that one) Needless to say, we got off track, because we gave ourselves quite a challenge. But eventually we came up with the rough draft. We liked it all except for the second to last sentence which became the topic of conversation for most of the meeting.
After giving some time for this parable to just sit for a while the end finally came to us. We had to change our last sentence as well as a few before, but everything fit. The metaphors and everything came together in a way that I could never have even hoped for. And so now it’s done, and I’ll always be amazed at the mastery of Jesus in his teaching.
Tonight we present it…
