The Daughters of Promise team asked me to contribute an article for each of their magazine issues this year. The themes they assigned were too beautiful and exciting for me to refuse to write about even though I didn’t actually need three new projects with deadlines. This blog post is the article I wrote for their Storyseekers and Storytellers issue.
The stories in this photo are some of my favorites. I’ve read all of them at least twice.
I was returning from a missionary conference where Elisabeth Elliot had spoken. Riding a big, lumbering bus through green Irish scenery, I read as miles disappeared behind us. I was reading Mrs. Elliot’s latest book, Quest for Love, which she had autographed for me. It had been a hard year for me, adjusting to a new life in a new country. But even more difficult, I was holding heartbreak, a romantic hope deferred.
In the book, Elisabeth Elliot wrote of her own broken heart when she said goodbye to Jim, the man she loved, and didn’t know when she’d ever see him again. She had been so distressed that she threw herself on her bed, crying so loudly that her landlady rushed in to ask what was wrong.
In that bus, surrounded by silent strangers, I read her story for the first time and wept. Tears dripped off my nose because I felt so relieved and comforted. I saw that my hero, the extraordinary Elisabeth Elliot, had also cried. She, too, had felt deep distress about her romantic hopes and big questions with no answers, and she had sobbed, too. I suddenly didn’t feel so alone, and a significant increment of healing happened deep inside me on that long bus ride.
Women—like Elisabeth Elliot—are good at telling stories. Our stories hold immense value when we share them. Women are the life-bearers and nurturers, and telling stories is a way we offer life to each other. Elisabeth’s story did for me what all good stories do:
- Stories show us what is good, beautiful, and true.
- Stories give us hope because they show we’re not alone.
Remember that time you heard about someone’s experience, and it helped you feel new energy to keep walking? It was only a little snapshot, a short testimony, a tiny snippet from their life that they shared with you, but it gave you enough light that you still remember it and make decisions accordingly.
Each life has many, many mini-stories in it. Think about your own story—not the long arc of your life, but that little scenario from yesterday or a prevailing memory from last year. Any time you want something and go through conflict to find it, you have the beginning of a story. In your best stories, a hero arrives on the scene and helps you receive the object you wanted at the beginning of the story.[1] This is the illustration or snapshot from your life that you can offer to your world at the appropriate time to demonstrate what is good, beautiful, and true. This is your story.
Let’s unpack this definition of story so that you can identify yours.
You want something.
Our hearts are always moving in a specific direction. We lie if we say we don’t want anything. But desire is risky and potentially overwhelming. Hence, it can feel easier to shelve desire rather than to hold it, or cover it up with a thick blanket of love for interior design or books—safer, more kosher desires to live with.
But for just a minute here, sit still and ask yourself what Jesus asked many people: What do you want? Probe the longings under those longings. Don’t be afraid to explore and sit in those caverns for five minutes. What emerges from that silence reveals an extremely important part of your story.
Cinderella wanted to go to the ball. Winnie the Pooh wanted a jar of honey. Anne wanted puffed sleeves. But under those dreams were deeper longings. Cinderella wanted to belong. Winnie the Pooh wanted the taste of honey on his tongue. Anne wanted to be beautiful. Your desires are the signs of an alive, beating, beautiful heart, not something to be ashamed of.
The minute you stop desiring, your story stops. If the blind men hadn’t wanted to see, Jesus wouldn’t have healed them. If the bleeding woman hadn’t been desperate for healing, she would never have touched Jesus’ hem and been healed, and she’d have had no story.
So, what do you want? What will you want today when you go shopping? What did you want on Sunday when you walked into church? What did you want when you picked up your phone just now? It’s important to name your desire because it gives you a clue about what you value most and what kind of story you will live.
You must go through conflict to find what you want.
Conflict, like desire, is wildly uncomfortable. So it makes sense that we hush conflict as much as possible. Conflict in our stories can look like disappointment, illness, questions with no answers, or difficult relationships. Name a disruption in your life or your day. You could make your own list of curve balls and disagreements just from yesterday, because all our stories hold some kind of difficulty where we conflict with ourselves, others, nature, or God.
Conflict is the place where your story turns, and good comes from it (eventually). Without conflict, your story flatlines. Without the conflict with Joseph’s brothers, Joseph’s story would just have been about Joseph in the field. Without conflict between His will and the Father’s will, Jesus would only have been sitting in the dark in the garden of Gethsemane.
Because of the significant disruption of my experience of fibroids, years of pain, and resulting hysterectomy at age 39, I became more sensitive to people’s pain than I would have otherwise, and I’m thankful. Janette Walls’ story in The Glass Castle shows that without her dysfunctional parents and their hurtful choices, she’d never have decided to pursue a better life.
The points of conflict in a story are the precise points where the story improves. In literature, we call these “inciting incidents.” Sometimes, the situation worsens before it turns positive, but the plotline turns on these points and makes the conflict enrich the story, deepening its impact. The impact comes from how clearly it shows us what is good, beautiful, and true.
Your true hero is Jesus.
Out of conflict, heroes emerge. To be clear: you’re an important character in your story, but not the hero. Your pain, your disappointment, or your demanding situation is not your hero or the most important part of your story. I don’t mean to sound like your predictable Sunday school teacher, but Jesus is the hero of your story.
Without conflict, we don’t know that we need Jesus. Jesus the hero does not exist to make all our dreams come true or take away all the conflict we live with, but to bring us to a deep connection with Him. He is who makes our stories ultimately true, good, and beautiful.
You dream and talk and shop and eat differently depending on who your hero is, the person you admire, the one you want to be like. So, who is your hero? How does your story make Jesus look good?
Your story matters!
Women are good at telling stories, but they’re also good at comparing their story with others’ stories, and this takes them to sad places.
Your story matters, even if it feels ordinary and insignificant. When Anabaptists in Switzerland were hunted like criminals, the boundary line of one canton ran through one Anabaptist family’s house. This meant hunted people were safe on one side of the house but not the other. Can you imagine the drama and actual “cops and robbers” scenarios inside those walls? Meanwhile, we can assume that the lady of the house was baking bread and sweeping crumbs from the floor and mending holes in aprons. Her ordinary, mundane days made it possible for people to find shelter in her house.
Do your days feel dull? Does your ordinary story give hope and safety to your world? Your story—your ordinary, daily, mundane story matters!
Maybe you feel that your story doesn’t fit well with the stories around you. It’s odd, misshaped, and feels out of place.
Queen Esther was an orphan raised by a cousin and placed in a harem, which sounds like a dysfunctional, disastrous story on every level. Esther’s story didn’t develop like other Jewish girls, but hers was an utterly vital story.
If your story feels too normal or too odd to contribute to your world, take another look at what you long for, the conflict you’ve encountered in pursuing it, and the hero you’ve chosen. When you tell your neighbor or sister or best friend your ordinary story of what happened last week, or that wild, nonsensical occurrence from last year, you might give a bigger gift than you see now.
Your ordinary story can demonstrate how to live well without you preaching how to live well. Your strange story can help someone feel hope because they know they’re not alone. Your story is more valuable than you know!
It’s been thirty years since that bus ride home when Elisabeth Elliot’s story comforted me so deeply. What is your story? How could it help someone else feel less alone?
You should usually wait to share your story until someone asks for it. You should offer it humbly, not mapping your story on theirs as if you have all the answers. But your story—your plain, puzzling, aching story—when it demonstrates what is good, true, and beautiful, is a way you offer hope and goodness to your world.
[1] I’m indebted to Donald Miller, his Storyline conference, and his multiple books for this simplistic definition of story. It does not fit all the definitions of literary stories, but it fits the contours of living a good story.
I wrote a book once, and it’s not a story, though it has one piece of fiction in it, written in first person. The fiction is so colorful that a friend thought it had happened to me, which pleased me enormously. The book is about living well when you find yourself in a story you hadn’t planned. You can buy it here!
Tis a Gift to Receive 