Stories: The ones we watch and the one we live

You work all day, drive home, maybe eat some dinner, plop on the couch—and if you’re anything like me—turn on the TV.

I was once rigid about television. The days before I followed Jesus were filled with episode upon episode, but later on I desired to be “radical.” God’s mission is serious, I learned, and so TV didn’t really have a place. I prided myself in not having a Netflix subscription. After all, I had more important things to think about.

While I don’t wish for anyone to be consumed by their electronics—television or otherwise—I now think I was wrong. TV can be a place to experience rest and behold art. It’s a medium of hearing stories.

I’ve been thinking a lot about stories lately, the kind you get yourself lost in. The good ones have a world you long to inhabit but find yourself content as an outsider peering in. I feel this way with Harry Potter—and as midnight movie premieres and Harry Potter world can testify: I’m not the only one.

I get lost in TV shows: Ted Lasso, New Girl, Only Murders in the Building. I’m ready to join AFC Richmond, live in the loft, and solve murders in the Arconia. Their stories have become part of my own.

I used to think the emotional low after finishing a good story was because I got “too emotionally invested.” While it’s wise to be mindful about the narratives we let influence us, now I determine a story’s quality by whether I am emotionally affected. A little grief about the story ending means I was fully engaged. I empathized with the characters and I cared about their lives. Being shaped by stories is something to pursue, not avoid.

I can’t help but think, though, how our desire to live inside a captivating story points to something more. My desire to live in the stories of Harry Potter, Ted Lasso, or Only Murders in the Building is no accident. I love stories because I too am living in one. I desire to inhabit their world because their world reflects the one I’m headed towards.

Sometimes we miss the big picture: we plunge ourselves into other worlds in an effort to escape our own. We live vicariously through the TV’s or book’s world while we lose hope for our own. We think the stories we read are better than our own lives to such a level that we disengage. I’m not opposed to a good distraction. Honestly, I think that can be healthy.

When escape dominates, I wonder if we’ve lost sight of the connection between the story world and our own. We’ve started consuming and we’ve stopped beholding. We’ve forgotten what the story really points to. Stories are meant to aid us in real life, not take us away from living.

The most captivating story we read and the most fascinating world we enter cannot supersede the one we’re living in. Sometimes this doesn’t appear true, especially when they end “happily ever after,” or at least have some satisfying resolution. On the screen, we see good win out, the conclusion, the restoration.

We don’t see that in our own lives, not fully. We continue to ache for a new world that isn’t fully realized and we long for a wondrous story still incomplete. Right now, we only see in part. But the restoration is coming. The seasons and sagas will end, but our story is still being written.

The best ones we read and watch and write reflect what’s still to come.