Which story?

If someone asked you to share "your story," how would it go? Or what about the other stories you voice each and every day? Are they good or bad, positive or negative?

Or, as Mark Yaconelli asks in chapter 11 of 'Between the Listening and the Telling: How Stories Can Save Us.' 

"Are the stories that shape you death dealing or life giving? Do the stories you hold as sacred heal, or do they exacerbate the suffering? Do they bring out your loving nature, do they cultivate freedom? Or do they bum you out, make you more afraid, anxious, resentful, and bitter? What are the stories you hold as sacred, the ones you tell your children, the ones you want remembered at your funeral?"

Yeah... this chapter smacked me in the face this morning and I'm still a little wobbly just thinking about it.

The fact is, I intended to write today about how much my life is in disarray right now. The first visit with my new doctor didn't go so well last week. Our house is still a mess with all our food and kitchen stuff in the living room - going on seven weeks, and we're now in week two of not being able to use the kitchen at all! And... work just sucks. No one seems to recognize (or care about) the stress created when someone who has nothing to do with us decides to completely change the makeup of the staff - and no one tells us anything! To top things off, I just discovered this morning that this past Monday was my five year anniversary of working here. Ha! And do you think anyone noticed?! Not a soul.

That's what was swirling 'round my brain when I stumbled into this reading. It's an awful ugly truth to be confronted by so early in the day. What has happened to my stories, and why are they so negative, lonely, and regrettable now?

Yet it was also a good reminder of how different my stories used to be. From the early 1990s through the 2010s it seemed so much better. Then they were all about newfound discoveries of faith, love, hope, change for the good. Life seemed good. I seemed ALIVE!

So, for right now, I need to sit with this for a bit. It's a stark contrast. The difference is vast. And I wonder: do our circumstances determine the stories we tell, or do the stories we tell make our circumstances seem different? 

***

1 Corinthians 2:14

“The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.”