God Creates with Narrative Meaning
Years ago, I got my first tattoo: a tiny open quotation mark on the inside of my right wrist.
People ask about it fairly regularly. More than once, someone has looked at it and asked if it's a semicolon tattoo — a symbol often used by people who have survived suicidal ideation. It isn't. Mine marks a very different moment in my life. But I never find their guess strange, because what strikes me is that nobody — not once — has looked at that mark and assumed it means nothing. Instinctively, people construct a story.
We are creatures who look for narrative meaning. We cannot help it. The world we live in is narrative by nature.
Our impulse to know the story is bigger than tattoos. The phrase "lore drop" has somehow become normal vocabulary. Millions of people listen to podcasts that consist almost entirely of strangers reading stories from Reddit. "Storytime" videos dominate social media.
Yet we struggle because culturally, we tend to define "information" and "story" roughly the same. I noticed this in a particularly funny way after Radio Violence (an episodic audio drama I created) came out; I was genuinely shocked by how many people listened to the first episode and then skipped straight to the last one! I mean, I understand the impulse. They wanted to know the answer. But in a mystery, the answer isn't the point. The story is. Strip away the journey and you've traded understanding for trivia. As a writer, that feels like the worst kind of loss!
I think we've started doing this with the rest of life, too. We know things about people instead of knowing their stories. We’ve done away with mythology, where we could identify ourselves in stories about the world instead of merely observing data about things. We've traded connection for connectivity.
But God's creation doesn't work that way. God doesn't simply create things. He creates history.
Hebrews 11:3 suggests this is actually part of creation itself — not simply that the universe exists, but that it was made to be read. "By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command" — we look at what exists and intuit a before, a purpose, a direction. It's why a child asks "Why?" about absolutely everything. Creation is simply impossible to understand without narrative. It was designed to unfold stories.
We live in an age of summaries. Bullet points. Headlines. Bios. We compress people into job titles, neighborhoods into real estate values, paintings into prices, and ourselves into résumés.
But God almost never introduces anything that way. Consistently, He gives genealogies, journeys, covenants… God introduces people and places and things through their history.
The world He made is not meant to be viewed in slices, but strands; every created thing points backward and forward at once.
That pattern keeps repeating as God relates to humans and guides our relationship with the rest of creation. When the nation of Israel needs to re-learn the Law, Deuteronomy 6 records God's answer — and it's not a better explanation of the rules, it's a story. "We were Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt. But the Lord brought us out with a mighty hand..." The whole chapter, the Law of God is interwoven with the history of His people, and commandments contain references to their past and awareness of their future. This is because the commandments were embedded in specific events, specific places, specific people.
God didn't create the Law and then suggest narrative as a helpful teaching tool; He created the Law to be inherently narrative — participation in an ongoing story.
You see this again post-exile, in Nehemiah 9; it, too, is a retelling of Israel's entire history, because recovering the land required reorienting themselves in narrative. You see it yet again in Jesus’ own life, when Jesus meets disciples in His heavenly body and chooses not to show them the physical proof, but to re-tell the whole story of Scripture and recontextualize the Prophets (Luke 24:25-27). Because Jesus entered the world and suffered to participate in God’s grand narrative for humanity.
Over and over, the Bible demonstrates: We lose the plot. We flatten God’s creation and the narrative that it holds into mere things and data-points. So God is constantly in the business of reminding us of the story, and constantly in the business of transforming our understanding.
To know God is to sit at the feet of the greatest storyteller of all time, in suspense, remembering what's come before and wondering what's next.
Which means Romans 8:28 — "in all things God works for the good of those who love him" — is not a promise that things will be pleasant or quickly resolved. It is a promise that events are being gathered into purpose. That nothing is simply happening. That the painful chapter, the confusing season, the failure you can't stop thinking about, is inside a story whose Author has not lost the thread, even when you have.
Then it all culminates in Creation again at the end of the Bible.
Notably and perhaps surprisingly, Revelation 21 doesn't return us to Eden — it gives us a city. The nations bring their glory into the New Jerusalem (v. 26), and what was made and learned through human history is carried forward, not erased (v.24). We don't arrive as blank slates reset to pre-Fall innocence. We have lived through the story. We have been formed by it. Even Christ still bears the scars of his crucifixion.
The ending doesn't erase the middle. It transfigures it. The New Creation isn't a fresh start so much as a fulfillment. Because Creation isn’t just a broken object, discarded and replaced; it is a story, still unfolding all the way to the ending.
So... what does this mean for those of us who make things?
First: Stop compressing creation into facts; expand things back into stories.
Perhaps a silly example is the New York City subway. I know, I know; the microbiome on the tiles is terrifying, the delays are a spiritual discipline in patience, and someone’s always eating a tin of tuna somehow at 10am. But when I take it, I think about how it was constructed at great risk over a hundred years ago, and how it transformed the role of women by offering them unprecedented freedom, and how now, when I ride on it to get coffee or buy something, I’m participating in what was marvelous and hard-won.
So look more deeply at things around you. Ask where it came from. Who made it? How have hands or winds or sunlight affected it over time? What might come after it? Look at scars and callouses and wrinkles (and yes, even subway rats) with the wonder they deserve.
Secondly: Examine what it is that you're remembering in your own life.
When we look back at our lives, we draw connections and tell stories to decide which experiences matter most and what they mean. I don't think this is a bad thing — but I do think we need to do it mindfully.
In years of tutoring, this is actually what I’ve found matters most. I’ve watched children string unrelated setbacks together to say: “I'm just not one of the smart kids.” And yes, I taught them math and English — but unraveling the thread they drew, helping them think of the narrative as ongoing, emphasizing different moments in their story that they're quick to overlook — that’s what led to dramatically different outcomes for those kids.
The Israelites in Nehemiah 9 needed to retell their whole history before they could find their footing again. We are not so different.
Be careful about what narratives you’re letting into your life, and above all, what narratives you’re telling yourself.
And finally: Think of your own creative life as a narrative instead of a product.
It's so easy to evaluate ourselves by our current work. Is this painting good? Is this script working? Did enough people come to the show? But God rarely seems interested in evaluating creation as isolated moments. He works across generations. Across covenants. Across centuries.
So ask different questions. How did you become this kind of artist? What first made you fall in love with this craft? What fears have you outgrown? What subjects keep calling you back? What stories have quietly shaped the way you see the world? What has God been teaching you through the long arc of making?
Because your creative work didn't begin with your latest project, and it won't end with it either.
Your life is still being written.
Which is why I’ve kept that little quotation mark open on my wrist all these years; I need the daily reminder that the Story–my story, all the little stories I intersect with, and the big story of Creation itself–isn't finished.
(Cue Natasha Bedingfield.)
