Stories

Moving is exhausting and exhilarating all in one.  

  What's exhausting is that I'm still not unpacked and still making trips to my mom's house to load more things and unload them at my apartment.  I feel so unsettled.  I hate feeling unsettled.

  What's exhilarating about moving is all the things I'm finding that I completely forgot about.  I’ve been going through old boxes and piles of things at my mom’s house trying to de-clutter some of my life while moving my things to my own apartment.  It’s adventurous.  (And slightly overwhelming).

  I’ve sifted through stacks of old high school papers, my nursing school acceptance letter, birthday cards, pictures, crafts from elementary school, clothes, sweet notes from friends, journals, and things I forgot even existed.  I’m too sentimental and I keep way too much crap. 

But it's been so fun to find these things and sit and laugh while I look through them.  Some of the things I've found have made old scars ache, some have made new wounds ache, some have me glad for certain decisions that I've made, some have made me laugh at myself, some have reminded me of how loved and cared for I am, some have made me proud of the woman I am and the woman I'm becoming.  It's like I'm looking through the story that I've told with my life so far.  It's like I'm seeing myself in a different way.  The past few weeks I've been getting to read my own story, so to speak... Which got me thinking about stories: the one I'm telling and the ones I'm a part of.  

I love stories. 

  I like reading and getting lost in the story. I like the Bible and how Jesus told so many stories. I like to talk with people and hear their stories.  If anyone knows my family, they know we tell a lot of stories.   

  I’m convinced that if you look at life like you’re telling a story, you live differently.  What kind of story are you telling?  What kind of stories are you involved in?  You don’t just tell your own story, you’re a part of other peoples’ and they’re a part of yours.  It blows my mind that there are so many stories going on around me, that even though they can be similar that no one’s is exactly the same.  Every wedding I have been in or been to, every late night conversation with a friend, every 2AM adventure with my roommates in college, every heartbreak, every 12 hour shift in a ghetto ER in Oklahoma City, every Sunday spending time with friends, every sunset, every 5k/half marathon, every minute, every hour, every day.  Stories, all the time, everywhere.  I can hardly stand it, it makes me feel so alive.   

  What kind of story are you telling with you marriage? With your job?  With your kids?  With your friendships?  With your family?  With what little, precious time we have here? 

                        “A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.”  -Donald Miller

  

  I think some people are trying to merely exist, to tiptoe through life and just survive.  When I see people like that I want to say, “Hey, you’re telling a story! Make it a good one.  Stop trying to just survive and live.”   

  My favorite part about living a story is that if you find yourself in the middle of a story you don’t want to be telling, you can tell a different one, a better one.  It’s exciting and freeing and empowering.  I didn’t like the story I was telling for a couple of years in college, so I started telling a different one.  Not that parts of that story weren’t or aren’t beautiful, because it still brought me to where I am today, but I knew it was heading in a direction of a story I didn’t want to tell.  What changed is that I realized that I couldn’t really write my own story, that if I knew Jesus and loved him, and followed him, and trusted him that He could write a better one for me.  I know this sounds painfully cheesy, but bear with me. 

  What I’m saying is if you know God and trust him and seek him, you start to ask yourself if what you’re doing is bringing light or darkness, glorifying or not glorifying, tearing down or building up, fulfilling or superficial, good or evil.  I think when you realize that choosing Jesus means choosing stories and telling stories that involve him, there’s a little more clarity in your life about where you’re heading.  You’re either moving towards Jesus or not.  I don’t think there’s an in-between.   I don’t think that choosing Jesus means it will be easy, I think it means that you have hope that it will be worth it. 

  I work in a high stress, high burnout job.  My coworkers joke and ask me if I hate it yet.  I’m not trying to fool anybody, sometimes I feel just as jaded as the next ER nurse, but I know that I’m there for a reason and I only have about 2 hours with my patients to try and make a little difference, to smile at them and make them feel cared for.  I try not to roll my eyes when they rate their abdominal pain a 10 out of 10 while they slurp their big gulp and eat some more Cheetos.  When I take care of federal prisoners or the patients the police bring in to get medically cleared to go to jail, I stopped asking what they did to get arrested or be in prison for life.  I try to ignore the chains they’re shackled with and still offer them a warm blanket and make sure their pain is as controlled as I can make it.  It’s hard, and sometimes I find myself thinking they don’t deserve a warm blanket and they deserve to be in pain, but they do deserve a blanket and to be as comfortable as possible as much as the next person.  Because I don’t want to tell a story of judgment or condemnation but of love and kindness, because I think love wins and kindness is always the better option, that being jaded and hateful and condescending is too exhausting.  This is just part of the story I'm trying to tell. 

  I just finished re-reading this book called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller.  He talks about telling a story with your life, and maybe that’s why I’m so hyped up on stories. I want to tell a good one, a memorable one, one that changes people and invites them to come along with me and tell stories, permission to tell theirs.  Donald Miller talks about how stories aren’t always about the ending but the character transformation that happens.  I think that’s exactly what life is like--sometimes things don’t work out the way we envisioned, but we come out different-hopefully wiser and better people.

  I titled this blog “Come Alive” because of one of my favorite quotes: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”  I write about what makes me come alive, the things that I’m telling with my story.  Jesus makes me come alive. Nursing/medicine makes me come alive.  People make me come alive. I want to tell about those things, and I want people to see those things in me.

  May you tell your story with passion and boldness, with a fierce kind of knowing that you are important and that you matter and that your story deserves to be told.  Make it yours.  Tell it proudly. 

“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.”

                                                                        -F. Scott Fitzgerald