Story

We all love a good story. We love hearing about the person who made it despite all the odds. Every memorable story has some personal heartwarming element, a little conflict and tension, and then a wonderful resolution. And if the story is presented with all loose ends tied up, an emotionally satisfying denouement. If in the genre of self-help, a story will quickly be followed up with how you can see the same result in your own life. The inevitable result of hearing such stories is that we begin to compare it with our own lives. But this only confuses the matter when they look nothing alike. I read books and hear stories and think, “why doesn’t my life match up?”

I believe that the problem rests in the fact that we get the highlights of many years and endless minutes of someone’s life which woven together makes a great story.  But we miss every moment that was forgotten, confusing, or just plain boring.

The fact is, we have many more moments of nothing happening in our own lives than are told by others. We experience the mundane and we determine that we must be doing something wrong. We may try to make each moment of our life a kiaros moment, that moment of breakthrough or ultimate fulfillment, but we may become tired or confused when we have moments we cannot control.

So what is really going on? The crux of the issue: these down moments are not just filler until the next grand moment, these moments are just as important. We live a story that isn’t just those entertaining moments strung together to create an epic movie. We live a story that is life in its entirety.

These are the moments when nothing is mentioned in the Bible. They are the silent Wednesday’s before the crucifixion. They are each and every day of the 40 years of God’s people wondering in a desert. They are the long 400 years of silence from God regarding His plan for His people. These are the moments never mentioned. These are the moments of deep internal wrestling and intimacy with God when it seems like nothing is happening. These are not just filler. These are the moments that make the grand events significant.

Even so, we may get discouraged when we don’t measure up to stories we hear. So how can we respond? Our challenge in life is to start finding God in all moments, not just the memorable ones. We need to realize that the stories we hear have hours of unspoken material. They have moments of dullness, moments of wanting to walk away. We must start telling stories that include all that God included in our narrative with Him and not just the narrative we want others to see. We must be remembered as the ones for which God was present with us for the whole journey and not remembered because of success. The more we perpetuate our own narrative, instead of God’s story of our lives, the more people believe the story we tell as normative for their life rather than the story that is true.

No wonder so many of us are disillusioned with the story of our own life. No wonder so many of us have difficulty seeing God. It has become increasingly difficult to not measure ourselves against a story that is simply not the whole picture. We must begin finding solace in God’s story for us.

Here some ways I have been able to do this in my own life:

• Take time to reflect on your day.

As we begin to give space to remember, we begin to see God in every movement. We also begin to remember those moments we would have otherwise forgotten.

• Live a life in honesty

We must be bold enough to be honest. If we use story to project an image of ourselves to others, we will avoid moments not story-worthy. We will also base our own identity on the story we desire to tell rather than the story we are living.

• Live your story

Be present in the moment. So often we are preoccupied presenting the story we desire to tell through social media. We are taking pictures of ourselves and our day so that others will buy into the story we project. Dare to be in the story you are living.