(Donald is up and telling a story about Robert McKey, film scholar)
(Robert McKey doesn't like Christians)
What's the basics of a story?
A story is a character that wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.
That's basically any story that you've ever encoutered.
(Via Ben Arment: Don is sick with the flu but he's speaking anyway!)
What's meaningful in a story is meaningful because it's meaningful in life.
Story teaches us so much about life.
Story has an unbelievable ability to engage the human brain.
Your brain engages music much differently than it engages noise.
Narrative engages the moral compass of the brain.
That's why the Bible uses so much narrative ... It's just story after story after story....
The Bible is for us to get to know who God is. That's all.
(LOVE that.)
We have the relationship with Scripture that's really strange....
We sit down with the Bible and we think, "What's in this for me?" What if it's just a relationship with God?
"Don't get mad at me, it's just a thought"
The number one way we learn is by living a story
Don to a friend: "What if life isn't meaningless, what if YOUR life is meaningless? What if your story isn't going anywhere and you're convinced the world is the same way."
A good character has to sacrifice themselves for the sake of others.
In my life, I was heading towards the end of my story and I wasn't a selfless person.
Success doesn't necessarily tell a good story.
You could come to the end of your story, even with success, and it can still be a let down.
A character is not who they wish they were ... In a story a character is only what they do! (Ooof.)
A character is only what they actually do.
In other words, if we think we're a dad that takes our kids fishing but we don't take our kids fishing, we're not the people we think that we are.
Character actually matters and success doesn't matter as much as we think that it does in order to tell a compelling story...
In life, in a story, we have to want something.
Even the poorest among us (in the West) have a lot ....
We should want more ... A lot more ... The problem is just what we want, not that we want something.
The stuff we want is what our story is about ...
The average American sees 3000 ad messages a day ... All trying to hijack your story into making it about something that it's not about
What story are you telling with your life?
If you were to go see a movie about a guy wrapping up a website it wouldn't be a very good movie.
I grew up without a dad. I don't know what to teach a kid without a dad. How to be bitter?
Conflict can be beautiful.
A story cannot be meaningful unless it involves conflict. But this sounds wrong to us because the commercials tell us we shouldn't have pain.
You are not going to resolve the conflict in your life by praying more ... COnflict is here to stay.
There was conflict before the fall of humanity ... God intended conflict in the Garden.
Adam, in Genesis 2, is experiencing something that he doesn't want to experience. He's experiencing lonliness.
(That's huge.)
And that was BEFORE the Fall.
Conflict is the only way that a character changes in a story ... That is true in story because it is true in life.
If it wasn't for the pain, we wouldn't have joy.
Conflict benefits us.
If Christians could have a courageous attitude toward conflict, we could change the world.
(Donald is just destroying preconceived notions of what it means to be a Christian)
We've been taught that Jesus is the climax of the story ... He's not. Our conversion is not the climax of the story.
Do you see the effects of commercialism on the Gospel?
We are in Act 2 in our story ... Do you know where Act 3, the climax, takes place? The wedding feast of the Lamb!
Jesus is not a product to be peddled.
What Jesus comes to bring is hope ... We can live with an incredible amount of hope because of that.
The number one way we consume story is through each other.
(And Don is off stage ... Probably to go wretch.)
