Foreword
A Love Story
Jesus knows something about me.
As it turns out, I am so hard-hearted—so thoroughly human—that if I am ever going to get anywhere close to keeping His Greatest Commandment (Matthew 22:37–39; Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27)—to love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength—then Jesus is going to have to tell me a new Jesus story.
Not a new gospel.
Not a new doctrine.
Not a new stick…
I need a new “carrot”.
A new story—one crafted specifically for me.
It has to be impressive to me.
Compelling enough that I get caught up in it.
Persuasive enough that I finally go all-in—loving Jesus as fully as He wants me to love
Him and His Father.
For me, a new story had to begin.
A personal story.
A Jesus story.
The Zion Coalition is one of the opening chapters of that new Jesus Story. And what follows here is the opening of that chapter.
Once upon a time, in or around London, England, Jesus and Alain de Botton made a short film—for me, and for Zion Coalition.
The movie you are about to see is an official part of Zion Coalition.
I doubt Alain de Botton knew he was scripting this film with Jesus, or that it was being made for me—so that I could finally understand what Jesus has been inviting me into since 2015: a new way of telling my life story.
One of the crucial elements of this new Jesus–Greg story is already present in what I’ve written so far. Notice the way I say—and genuinely believe—this: “Once upon a time, in or around London, England, Jesus and Alain de Botton made a short film—for me, and for Zion Coalition.”
Throughout the work of Zion Coalition, I make similar claims—and hold similar beliefs. At their core is this idea: that Jesus loves me enough to act personally and deliberately in my life. That He would do things that feel, on the surface, extravagant or improbable—like co-authoring classic rock songs (with Billy Idol, Led Zeppelin, Dire Straits, The Eagles, and others), then later redeeming those songs with me and turning them into worship hymns, complete with messages meant for my heart.
It includes believing that Jesus responds to my prayers in tangible ways—changing weather patterns when I pray for relief from drought; paying attention to my daily schedule; arranging meetings with angels and mortals I am meant to meet; and orchestrating collaborations I am meant to undertake.
In short, this new Jesus story is one in which Jesus is helping me learn to believe—slowly, patiently, and with His own assistance—that He is carefully orchestrating my life. That He is making things happen. And that He has been preparing elements of my story long before I was born.
This sense that Jesus is actively doing things in my life, for me is echoed beautifully in the hymn line:
“Oh, it is wonderful that He should care for me enough to die for me.”
That personalization—“Wow. Look what Jesus did for me.”—is everywhere in this story, because Jesus wants it to be.
Central to the new life story Jesus has been (telling me) inviting me to tell myself is 2,000 memories of my life that Jesus (with my help) is redeeming by RECOVERING (RE-imaginging) based on Matthew 25:38-40—-where I RE-call, “Oh, that’s right! Now I recall. You were there, Jesus. And so, Jesus is essentially revealing (and we together have been rehearsing as I receive them) 2,000 new verses to the old-time hymn, “I Stand All Amazed”.
“Oh, it is wonderful that He should care for me enough to….X…for me.”
What I did not understand at first—what took years to surface—is that Jesus was not merely inviting me to believe a few better ideas, or to try harder, or to behave more faithfully. He was inviting me to let Him rework the entire operating system by which I perceive reality, remember my past, interpret my present, and imagine my future. The invitation was not incremental; it was total. And once I finally saw that, it became clear that anything less than a full re-narration of my inner life would always leave me stuck—trying to love God with the right intentions but the wrong internal story.
The path Jesus has had me on recently has been nothing less than a comprehensive, whole-life mind-and-heart retraining system.
It is radical.
It is rigorous.
It is all-consuming.
And yet—it feeds my soul. Otherwise, I could never sustain it.
It gives me hope.
It gives me direction.
Jesus does.
At the core of this work, Jesus has been teaching me how I, Greg, am meant to narrate my life.
My Jesus–Greg Story is best understood as a building project—one Jesus is orchestrating, and one I am helping Him build.
That project is this: a personal Jesus world.
Think the Marvel Universe—but a JesusVerse.
I once was lost, but now I’m found.
More conventionally, this is called a deep, personal relationship with Jesus Christ—one that has come with a mighty change of heart.
If your life story is working fine for you, there is no need to change it.
Mine wasn’t.
Not ever—before.
Now it is.
Now it works.
Better and better.
Hallelujah.
Praise Jesus.
And the following film has been crucial to that transformation.
“How To Narrate Your Life Story” (Script)
At moments of sorrow and exhaustion, it is only too easy to look back over the years and feel that our lives have, in essence, been meaningless. We take stock of just how much has gone wrong: how many errors there have been; how many unfulfilled plans and frustrated dreams we’ve had. We may feel like the distraught, damned Macbeth who, on learning of his wife’s death, exclaims at a pitch of agony that man is a cursed creature who: …struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. [Life] is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. No life can avoid an intermittently high degree of ‘sound and fury.’ The question is whether it must also, ultimately, signify nothing. As Macbeth’s lines hint, this will depend on who is telling it. In the hands of Shakespeare’s (bracingly termed) ‘idiot’, the story of a life may well turn into unintelligible and dispiriting gibberish. But with sufficient compassion and insight, we may equally be able to make something different and a great deal more meaningful and redemptive out of the same material. The difference between despair and hope is just a different way of telling stories from the same set of facts. Only a small number of us ever self-consciously write our autobiographies. It is a task we associate with celebrities and the very old – but it is, in the background, a universal activity. We may not be publishing our stories, but we are writing them in our minds nevertheless. Every day finds us weaving a story about who we are, where we are going and why events happened as they did. Many of us are strikingly harsh narrators of these life stories. We hint to ourselves that we’ve been morons from the beginning. We’ve stuffed up big time. It’s been one disaster after another. That’s how we go about narrating, especially late at night, when our reserves of optimism run dry and the demons return. Yet there is nothing necessary about our self-flagellating methods of narration. There could always be ways of telling very different, far kinder, and more balanced stories from the very same sets of facts. You could give your life story to Dostoevsky, Proust or Jesus and come out with a rather bearable, moving, tender and noble story. Good – by which is meant fair-minded and judicious – narrators know that lives can be meaningful even when they involve a lot of failure and humiliation. Mistakes do not have to be absurd; they can be signs of how little information we have on which to base the most consequential decisions. Messing up isn’t a sign of evil; it’s evidence of what we’re up against. Not all the disasters were wasted anyway. Maybe we spent a decade not quite knowing what we wanted to do with ourselves professionally. Maybe we went through a succession of failed relationships that left us confused and hurt a lot of people. But these experiences weren’t meaningless because they were necessary to later development and maturity. We needed the career crisis to understand our working identities; we had to fail at love to fathom our hearts. No one gets anywhere important in one go. We can forgive ourselves the horrors of our first drafts. The good storyteller recognises – contrary to certain impressions – that the central character of the story isn’t always responsible for every calamity or triumph. We are never the sole authors of anything that happens to us. Sometimes, it really will be the economy, our parents, the government, our enemies or simply the tragic dimensions of human existence. Good narrators don’t over-personalise. Every day, we are induced to narrate a bit our life story to ourselves: we explain why there was pain, why we forgot to seize a chance and why we’re in an unhappy situation. It does not need to be a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing. It can be a tale told by a kind, intelligent soul signifying rather a lot: like almost every life story, it is in truth a tale of a well-intentioned, flawed, partially blind, self-deceived but ultimately dignified and good human struggling against enormous odds and, sometimes, on a good day, succeeding just a little in a few areas.
Watch the film here: