By Sandra Bost
This past Sunday, I dropped my husband off at church to begin worship practice while I embraced my inner Proverbs 31 woman and fetched our food from afar.
On my way, I heard one of the radio personalities on WayFM pose a question she had recently come across: “If your early life was a movie, what would the audience be screaming at the screen?” She described a theater filled with excited moviegoers watching a scene in which a prowler lurks behind a bush, yelling at the girl NOT to open the door.
I listened as callers chimed in with gems like “Don’t cut your own bangs!” “Put down the Cheetos!” and “Don’t shave off the beard!” They were all funny and relatable. (Except the beard, of course. Although, there is that one chin hair. But I digress.)
The question instantly sent me down memory lane, imagining what the audience in my theater might be yelling.
My first stop was middle school, where the drama was high and the maturity was low. My omniscient theater audience could see right through my brave face to how deeply I took every random hallway insult to heart, letting those words live rent-free in my head. I could practically see them, frustrated by my total lack of perspective, throwing popcorn at the screen as they shouted, “Don’t listen to them! Half of them can’t even open their own lockers!”
High school was stop No. 2, and it was a welcome relief. I had finally managed to fly under the bullies’ radar and rebuild my social standing through student council and various clubs. Being a band nerd was actually pretty cool by then, too.
However, I was first chair, which frequently landed me right on the 50-yard line under the Friday night lights with a trumpet solo. Naturally, this was my cue to choke.
Almost every time I stepped up to hit that glorious high G, what came out sounded more like a dignified cry for help as my trumpet’s spirit left its body. I’m convinced anyone watching my life from the future at that point would have hurled insults at my poor band director: “What are you doing? Put her back in the middle of the third-trumpet section, where it’s safe!”
Looking back, middle school was where I started learning to stop taking random insults to heart, and that high-G fiasco was my first real lesson in surviving public failure with a smile on my face — or at least an awkward grin. Every time my trumpet cracked and the Earth failed to open up and swallow me whole, Monday morning arrived with nobody giving it so much as a second thought.
Learning not to take myself — or anyone else — too seriously turned out to be a wonderful safety net for all the unexpected plot twists that lay ahead.
I let my mind travel to a few more stops before I was interrupted by the voice at the drive-thru asking for my order. It wasn’t until today that I circled back to those lessons.
I heard a song by Austin Ludwig called “Suffering Saints.” Ludwig wrote the song after searching for the goodness of God when he aged out of foster care. The lyric that grabbed my heart says, “You don’t cause the bad things, but you’ll give ’em good cause.”
It reminded me of a conversation I had this week with a sweet young mom who seems to be going through one fiery trial after another. I realized how desperately she needed to know that her current chapter isn’t the end of the story. When you’re standing in the middle of a hard season, it can feel as though the plot has completely gone off the rails and God is nowhere to be found.
But those lyrics carry a profound truth: God is not the author of our pain, but He is the absolute master of turning it into something purposeful. The awkward middle school years, the public halftime stumbles and even the heavy, agonizing trials of adulthood are all being woven into something durable and beautiful.
I realized that if all the difficult parts of my life had been projected on a screen before they actually happened — especially the ones where I had a choice — I might have been tempted to join the audience in begging my younger self to avoid the hallways with bullies and skip that solo. But those very broken, hard and scary moments — the ones we might never choose for ourselves — are the ones God can use to reveal His faithfulness, giving every trial a good, holy purpose in the end.
As Romans 8:28 promises, “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (ESV).
We don’t have to watch our lives unfold in fear or anxiety over what lies behind the next door. When we love God and walk with Him, we can rest with confidence, knowing that the ultimate Director is actively weaving every misstep, plot twist and difficult scene into a story that shapes us into His image — giving every bad thing a good cause.
So grab your popcorn, rest easy in the Director’s hands and trust Him through whatever scene comes next.
