Choose Your Own Adventure

by Wendy Gustafson

My 10-year-old granddaughter, Keira, is a great reader. She started early in her life and now hardly slows down to eat. She has even produced a few manuscripts herself. Keira reintroduced me to the series of books by R.A. Montgomery called “Choose Your Own Adventure.” When my kids were her age, they loved these books too. The library book we’re reading now is The Lost Jewels of Nabooti. When we travel in the car together, Keira reads the story out loud while I’m driving. I help with the hard words if I can guess from her try at pronunciation what word it might be, and we go on the adventure together.

Montgomery has an interesting concept. He has designed 38 different storylines in this one book. The first couple of pages are the set-up. We find out what the mystery is all about and get recruited to help. Then the first choice comes: “If you agree to go on tomorrow’s plane for Paris, go on to the next page. If you demand more time, information, and extra help, turn to page nine.”

And so it goes. Every few pages there is a choice to be made. It is not one choice that determines your fate in the story, it is many. Sometimes you wind up in a fruitless effort to escape a crocodile. Sometimes you end up the chosen leader for peace and justice.

So many paths are laid down for you by the author, so many endings prepared for you, gotten to by so many choices! To continue the story, you have to choose and choose again, yet you and the author work as a team to get you to the end, however deadly or delightful that end might be.

But remember, at any time, you can go back and make another choice. You can change the path of your story and affect its outcome. The new choice may take you over familiar ground for a while until you come to a turning point and a choice that changes everything.

God gave R.A. Montgomery the idea for this exciting series of books. God is an old hand at crafting adventure stories. He is the author of your life story, crafting both the beginning and the end. Your story starts in Love and ends in Love. You choose the many middle parts.

You never really know where your story will take you, but God the Author does. He is the one who has written the story. He is the one who imagined and planned it from the beginning. He knows every alternative offered. He knows every ending.

And every one of those endings is designed to end you up in the lap of God. It is His design to have you for His own forever.

Your life is an adventure that your choices write. The choices are daily—sometimes difficult, sometimes delightful. They may seem accidental, coincidental, or random. In reality they were planned before you were born. You choose, and then God the Author takes over. God is committed to anyway that will bring you home in the end. He has written that part where you get saved by a hero who sacrifices his own well-being to preserve and prosper yours.

It is all through the narrative, all through the story. Hiding in every choice you are given is that Hero who is always there to save and love you.

So choose. Choose to come safely home. Bring others with you. Involve the world in your happy ending.