A few weekends ago I was blessed enough to be able to go home and celebrate my grandmother's 70th birthday. It was awesome and I couldn't help but realize how lucky I am that in 25 years of life, I still have all four of my grandparents and have gotten to watch all of them celebrate their 70th birthdays and both sets celebrate 50 years of marriage. Pretty amazing. But story for another day.
Point being, in getting together with my family, and getting to spend time with my grandfather and his sisters, I realized that I come from a line of amazing storytellers. No matter what mundane, everyday scenario they're telling, it's always intriguing and usually hilarious. I find myself never wanting to open my mouth when I'm around them because I never want to cause them to stop talking. These are people who live in tiny farm towns in Iowa and somehow, every time I hear about the relatively slow lives that they live, I get sucked into it like a Harry Potter book. They talk about things like the farmer down the road or the lengths they went to to get Rosie the hummingbird to drink Aunt Shirley's sweet syrupy concoction. It's not that they're overly expressive or animated it's just the things that they choose to tell. It's the details they include and the details they leave out. It's the way they notice the quirky little pieces that make the story different than every other story, that make today different than every other routine day.
For most of my life I thought I wanted to be a writer. When I was a child, I wrote stories all the time. I went to school to do journalism. I wanted to write for a magazine for awhile. I was a writing coach in college. I thought that I adored writing. But as time goes on I realize more and more that it's not writing, but storytelling, that I love. And now I know that it's in my blood and although there are days where I think I'm crazy for the things that I pay attention to, I'm now fully confident that crazy or not, it's in my genes. There are times when people talk about my ability to write or my gift of writing and it almost makes me uncomfortable. While I so appreciate the thought, I'm ultimately not a great writer. I punctuate where my thoughts end, could care less about grammar, and start a ton of sentences with "and" or "but" because I usually write exactly what I think. But as I read back on some of my posts, I realize that much like my aunts, I think what gets people is the story I choose to tell.
I'm not going to tell you how beautiful Dorothy's little voice was. I couldn't actually describe that if I wanted to and it's kind of a given. She was Dorothy. Obviously she can sing. But my hope in telling you that this little girl needed a nap right before the show and told me that she wanted me to be there when she woke up hopefully spoke a lot more to the kind of person I was dealing with. Hopefully it spoke about the fact that she was the perfect Dorothy because in real life she was just this sweet little affectionate girl who adored the people around her. I can tell you that I feel like I live a "These Things Don't Happen to Normal People" life, but it's in telling you that I punctured my Wendy's cup with an earring and diet coke sprayed all over my car that it makes a little more sense.
I think I've probably been given a gift for it. But what am I really doing with it? What other stories am I telling? Am I telling people that Jesus died on a cross to save them from their sins? Not usually. Which is convicting enough. But would that
be the story I need to tell anyway? Because for me, and the way that I think, that would be like saying that the girl who played Dorothy could sing really well. How about this story...
That after being unemployed for 6 months and feeling desperately lost, my knees quite literally hit the ground and I said, "God, please...anything. I don't care if you give me a job, just show me where you want me to be. Just give me a part of the country to look in so that I feel like I have some sense of direction." And about 12 hours later I discovered a job posting for my dream job in Austin, TX...24 hours later I had an interview with them...and 3 months later I made the 14 hour drive with all of my belongings.
And if I feel the need to be funny, why aren't I telling this story...
That one Sunday afternoon in Austin, TX, not long after I moved here, I was feeling incredibly lonely. I was sitting outside at a restaurant and I prayed and said, "God, I don't know where you are. I don't know where anybody is. I just feel so alone." Minutes later a little green gecko literally appeared on the umbrella in the middle of my table. I watched him as he slowly and carefully walked down the stand and made his way onto the table in front of me. For the longest time, he just stayed there with me. Looking at me, looking at my food, wandering around, but never leaving. Even when I would move. For those of you that know how skiddish little lizards can be, you'll understand why this didn't make a whole world of sense. But I felt peace in that 20 or so minutes he was with me. I remember laughing and saying, "God really? A lizard?" But it worked. I was laughing rather than crying. I was feeling peace rather than anxiety. I was feeling companionship rather than loneliness.
On days when I feel overwhelmed with the thought about sharing the Gospel, I need to think about what story I'm going to tell. It's something I know how to do. It's in finding those funny, silly, quirky moments with Jesus that will make Him come alive. It's in the weight of a time of desperation that God swooped and rescued me that make Him compassionate, because simply saying that we were made by a compassionate and loving God seems like a distant and vague idea to most, even Christians. It's in not leaving out the details of God just because I'm scared of the reaction. Because if I choose to tell any of these little stories and leave God out of them, then maybe I'm telling the wrong story.
Maybe, just maybe, it's all in the story I choose.
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