But if we honestly name the passionate desires of our heart, and if we risk seeing those desires come to be, the plot of our life story will begin to move with greater intentionality. Yet the only way we can keep walking on that path is to allow our self moments to rest and celebrate the temporary climax of a story in denouement.

God is not bound by time, nor is our story. We desperately want our situation to be solved. We want resolution. But, God unfolds the plot in His own time. It is in our months or years of waiting that our story comes to maturity. It is over a lifetime of stories that he turns our desire toward Him.

Desire lies at the heart of who God made us to be, who we are at our core. Desire is both our greatest frailty and the mark of our highest beauty. Our desire completes us as we become One with our Lover, and it separates us from Him and brings death as it wars against His will.

It is not wrong to admit that our choices change little in this world; there is so much over which we can exert little if any influence. That doesn't mean our choices are meaningless; they matter and last into eternity because each of our individual lives is a thread of a great tapestry that in its corporate beauty is glorious. But we can't always see the future, nor how one seemingly small and insignificant choice ripples across countless lives.

In those moments of unnaming when we have lost ourselves, we must remember to return to our past redemptions to find God's mark of glory on our abandonment, betrayal, and shame. We wrongly believe that we will be happy if we can escape the past. But without our past we are hollow and plastic beings who have only common names and conventional stories. When we enter into our story at the point we lost our name, we are most likely to hear the whisper of our new name.

A denouement is not a complete or fully resolved ending but a satisfying closure to a story. [in French translates 'an untying, a relaxing of a knot of complexity']Denouement is the rest that comes when all the disparate plot lines of a story, gnarled and taut, have been untied and an order has come about that brings a new moment of shalom.

If we enter our story in heartache, we will hear the whisper of the name that will one day be ours.

...you can be assured that the inciting events call for you to sacrifice your comfort and ease in order for your story to move forward. It's easy to ignore such inciting events...It's easy to flee your story.

A new story begins the moment an old one ends. But a denouement is a respite that calls us to stop the journey for a brief interlude - to eat, drink, sing, dance and tell our story to others.