The Falling Action and the Field

In my freshman year of high school, I was fairly miserable at identifying the five essential elements of plot (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution).

To this day, the only reason I remember anything about them at all is because my English teacher used episodes of Scooby Doo to illustrate the different elements. Falling action vs. climax is where I got tripped up, the two are similar, and only discernible if you examine them relative to each other.

Every Scooby Doo episode has a big dramatic sequence (the climax) where the ghost/monster/zombie chases The Gang through the haunted mansion. The falling action is what comes immediately after: searching for her glasses that she lost during the chase, Velma bumps into a pulley wheel disguised behind a tapestry and realizes the ghost/monster/zombie is actually the janitor in a costume, hooked up to an elaborate cable system jerry-rigged throughout the mansion. Meddling kids.

I confused the two because, to me, they are both equally dramatic: the chase and the fallout.

It occurs to me that, if you look at the course of salvation history, we are living in the falling action, not the climax. Take the parable of the treasure in the field: we have found the treasure. But we haven’t yet bought the field.

I often make the mistake of thinking I am still lost in the climax, searching for the truth. But I know exactly where the truth is.

What I need to be concerned with is this: am I doing what I need to do to buy the field?

“Wonderful are your decrees; therefore I observe them. The revelation of your words sheds light, giving understanding to the simple.” — Psalm 119

©LPi