Living Well
By Gerry Straker, 08 Jul 2026
Life is hard, life is ordinary - and it's supposed to be. The LORD does extraordinary things through ordinary Christians making the most of their time on earth in the places he has put them.
Below is very lightly edited from a section of the transcript of this podcast: Stories Are Soul Food, episode 209: Is Nolan Ragebaiting? (The Odyssey & The Return of Ashtown) [1]. I found this to be helpful and challenging and I hope you do too.
Living Well by Nate D Wilson [2]
What does it mean to live well from wherever you are? Begin to live well and then you realise that that always is on a rising scale of difficulty. If you live well, things are going to get harder and harder and harder and harder.
We love to quest for the easy moment, like trying to get to the weekend, trying to get to the weekend of life, trying to make our lives easier. You know, the four hour day, the four day work week, we're trying to find ways to simplify, optimize, ‘man, I could taper this off and just have income and then everything's easy.’
What are you doing? Of all the kabillions of people that could have been here and you're trying to find the easiest way to coast through life, like you're on the lazy river. You know, you're just in an inner tube going , what is that?
That's just not why God put us here. And so what does it mean to live well? It does not mean optimizing your income so that you are at rest the maximum amount possible.
That just is not what we're for. And so living like you're supposed to be used up, living like you're supposed to make the biggest differences you can in the lives of everyone around you, doesn't mean you're going to change the world. what does it mean to live well?
My daughter is doing a history project right now… she picked the beginning of Guadalcanal [3], because that’s where my grandfather was…Allied planes discovered a surprise attack coming from Japan on Guadalcanal. That was my grandfather who discovered that…And it turns out to have been huge in not just the history of Guadalcanal, but in the history of World War II. The fact that Allied planes found this invasion coming in time for the Navy to respond, as opposed to the making landfall, which is what would have happened. The Japanese were decimated. It demoralized their will and their purpose in trying to take Guadalcanal. It was this huge moment. And taking that field and that island was everything.
Now, the way he did that was by not snoozing when he was supposed to be doing his job. He didn't do anything special. So what he describes is pretty funny is that they were flying in a B-17, and there was cloud cover everywhere. And they're supposed to be out on a patrol. They're just out doing reconnaissance, trying to basically be the guards that would catch anything like this. Everybody was snoozing.
My grandfather was a second lieutenant co-pilot at the time. And he said, the way he put it was, 'old second lieutenant Greensides was on the binocs.' Everybody else in the plane was just dozing because it was totally overcast. There was a hard deck at 12,000 feet - the clouds solid. And he was just sitting there looking around. Tere was this moment where a this hole in the clouds as they went by.
And through that hole, he saw one ship. There it was. The clouds parted and there was a ship. And he roused everybody and made them drop to a low altitude. And there were 26 ships, destroyers, battleships, troop transports, all en route to Guadacanel. And so they flew around. He identified all the ships and radioed them in. And the Navy responded massively: huge casualties and obliterated everything.
Now that moment, the thing that was great about it was that he said, ‘I was just doing my job.’ There's nothing heroic about it. It was just one dude not trying to make it easy. You're supposed to be looking. That's it, it's not that hard. Nobody was there to make you not doze. And the difference was between dozing and looking and scouring clouds to see if any little chimneys would open and you'd be able to see through - the whole time for 400 miles, 400 miles of monotony. But the difference that was made from one guy just doing his job is really, really big in that environment.
Now, in our lives, you don't know when you're talking to somebody in Walmart, who they are, where they're going, what's going on, how many lives are changing, how many lives are hinging on your interactions. For my other grandfather, this 18-year-old girl in a one-room schoolhouse who caught him up after a bunch of sickness, and he thought he was stupid and was falling behind in school, caught him up, enabled him to get to the Naval Academy, and then life changes. My life changes, my dad exists, classical education exists.
All these things come, all his evangelism, all the souls saved and so on, because an 18-year-old girl committed to living hard within arm's reach in Nebraska in a one-room schoolhouse. So it's one of those things that when you think about what does it mean to live well and to be a good character in your story, it doesn't mean to go be famous. It doesn't mean to go be a gold medalist. It doesn't mean become president. It means to live hard and to be deeply committed to the hilt, to live well in your moments, understanding where those could all go...
So in terms of the avoidance of pain, the avoidance of hardship, are you seeking your own ease? What is it that you're doing? How do you live as a good character in your stories?
...So the thing I love in Tolkien and Lewis, too, is the sensation that there's all these stories that go off all these other directions. But we're following this one. The sensation of tapestry. And Lewis does it with Aslan saying: 'that's somebody else's story; I'm not telling you.' [4] That belongs to them. Tolkien does it like in 'The Paths of the Dead.' [5] There's one scene where there's a stone door and there's all this scratching and clawing on it. There's this body and a broken sword at the bottom of this door. Somebody was trying to get out. And there's a whole massive narrative right here. And Tolkien was the king of all the side stories. And so he did a bunch of backstory and side story that was published elsewhere. But the sensation of going through this world with these hobbits was not that this is the only part that was finished, over there is blurry and they didn't finish the graphics, like a video game, because you can't run over there. No. could go anywhere. There's narratives everywhere.
And that's actually what it's like. So what it's like for us is constantly going through life, meeting immortal souls, having contact with people on the sidewalk, strangers, grocery store lines, wherever, and then people close to us, friends and family, where we are an element in their life. We are good weather, we are bad weather, we are commitment, we are flakery.
What is it that we are? What is it that we are in their lives? What did we do? And sometimes, you are just doing your job and it changes everything. And sometimes, you are not doing your job and it changes everything. My dad said to me, probably since high school, ‘sometimes, ordinary mistakes have extraordinary consequences.’ And the same thing is true of ordinary faithfulness. Ordinary faithfulness can have extraordinary impact. Ordinary unfaithfulness can also have extraordinary impact, negatively.
So however we live and however we are, are we trying to make it easier and softer, like good Americans aiming for retirement, or are we trying to level up and have the largest impact we can have in our neighbourhoods, in the schools where our kids attend, in our churches, in our towns? How can we be high impact characters that end up touching and impacting a lot of people around us?...
So the goal for a really good story for me…is to have people feel…genuinely fueled and motivated, and...they are not then more bored and frustrated with their own lives. So it's really easy to read a book that's a good book, and at the end of it, feel bummed out. Look out your door…’I wish there was more of the story. I was enjoying escaping. I don't like my life, so I like jumping out of my life, and I like thinking about being at Hogwarts or whatever it is, but you come back to the real world, and you're like, oh, the laundry needs to be done. The bills need to be paid. The lawn needs to be mowed.' There's all these things, and you just don't like it, and you lose perspective, and you have this magical grass and this star that's fueling it, and it's all growing, being made out of thin air, and instead, all you see is a chore that you don't want to do. It's really easy to read, to escape this world and…in a way that resents this world. And my goal is to have people read in a way that doesn't resent this world, but read in a way that will fuel you and motivate you to live a great story as much as is in your ability to do so.
[1] The podcast's subjects are Christopher Nolan's film The Odyssey and the final instalment of N D Wilson's The Ashtown Burials a series of fantasy novels which I commend to you. Other sections of this podcast which I particularly enjoyed and you might too:
[2] The themes of this section are explored further in N D Wilson's excellent book: Death by Living.
[3] The Battle of Guadalcanal (fought August 1942 – February 1943) was a pivotal World War II campaign.
[4] In chapter 11 of The Horse and His Boy, Shasta wants to know more about what happened to Aravis and Aslan says this: '"Child," said the Voice, "I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no-one any story but his own."' Aslan says the same to Aravis in chapter 14 when she wants to know more about what happened to her stepmother's slave: "Child," said the Lion, "I am telling you your story, not hers. No-one is told any story but their own."
[5] This passage is in The Return of the King, chapter 2, The Passing of the Grey Company.