Your Life Tells a Story... Meeting The Challenge
As a spiritual director and a writer, I speak with many people who want to tell or write out their life story, and it’s my great honor to bear witness to those stories and encourage the excavation of memories and experiences that lead to a fuller understanding of who they are. I’ve found the ongoing work of exploring my own life to be one of the most formative in my relationship with God. Life, after all — physical, emotional, social, spiritual — is the holy ground where we come to know God as we learn to know ourselves. I want to give some space to explore the why and the how we embrace our own story in several posts that consider The Challenge, The Past Life, The Present Life, and the Future Life.
When we first approach our life story, we immediately hit obstacles that make it difficult to move ahead. Here are a few:
I’m intimidated about telling my story to others. First, bear in mind that your story is not just about telling it to someone else. In fact, we should tell our story to others only after we’ve told the story to ourselves, and that takes time and work. Looking back and really sitting with your life journey isn’t for the faint of heart. It takes an act of courage to name the joys, the rough edges, the deep wounds, the amazing victories and offer grace and gratitude for it all as the stepping stones that lead us home to ourselves and to God. If you are given opportunity to tell your story to others, you will be ready, and you will be bold because you’ve already embraced it and presented it as offering to God for his good purposes.
There’s so much to say that I don’t know where to begin. This is so true. And the deeper meaning and beauty of life is so much more radiant when we don’t try to present it all in one serving. Consider a season, a year, a decade at a time and pick five memories within that timeframe to focus on. When you do that, use all five senses to recapture how it felt, looked, or sounded like at that moment. What emotions were at work in you? What question does it raise? What mystery is left unsolved? A single incident, a moment in time, is where we find the profound epiphanies and awakenings. It’s not a chronologic, blow-by-blow account of your years, but the detail of a single moment that will define your life.
My life is just so ordinary and dull. If I may be blunt, no, it’s not. These kind of judgements on your God-given, life-bearing days belittles the fact that your soul is the image-bearer of God’s creative work. The “ordinary” tasks you performed today, and yesterday, and likely tomorrow, ground you and root you in the reality of this time, space, and environment where you have been placed. If it feels boring or uneventful, look deeper, dig further to the source of where your perspective on your life originates? Is not cooking another meal what is required to grow your children into healthy adults? Do not your conversations reveal your priorities, your character, your values in some way? This is why embracing your life story is work. It doesn’t take the easy way out, but continues to excavate what feels dull. It lays the bits and pieces out on the proverbial table to see what appears and to offer it all up as prayer.
What other obstacles get in the way of your telling, expressing, and embracing your own life? What would it feel like if you scheduled time each week to chew on a chapter of your life and listen for how it speaks and invites you to new understanding or bits of wisdom that have been dormant within you? Bottom line, the only way to get around the obstacles is simply begin.
