Our Stories

          For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)

 

I’ve been listening to a series of podcasts by John Ortberg. Yesterday’s broad topic was about our each having a story. He’s been talking about this idea for a couple of weeks, but it was only yesterday that my mind dredged up a memory of something that happened more than 25 years ago. A speaker said, “Someday, you’ll be up here telling your story.” As I drove home, I wept as I said to God, “But I don’t have a story.”

When I was doing genealogy, people told me that no one would be interested in their stories.

Both when I have raised puppies and when I have been around parents whose health was failing, I noticed that since I saw the puppy or the person every day, I didn’t notice their increase in size or decrease in health as clearly as someone who only saw the dog or parent once in a while.

We are blind to our own stories most of the time. We don’t notice our lives as stories because we’re too busy dealing with our lives or because our lives don’t seem to follow the simple pattern we expect in books. “Nothing ever happens” in our lives, we say, even though we’ve just gone through some trial. Perhaps we go so far as to express irritation because the challenge we’ve been facing is getting in the way of our having a story. The irritation is partly because we want our story to be a romance or a rom-com; instead, it’s a quest. We want it to be man against the world, but it is often man against himself.

But a word used in the last sentence is integral to a story: against. If everything went well, there would be no story. It’s the struggle against something that makes the story interesting. The character in the story doesn’t think so. Frodo Baggins, Harry Potter, and Luke Skywalker never consoled themselves with the idea that what they were going through would make their story interesting.

When Paul wrote of being convinced that nothing could separate us from the love of God, he was setting up our stories for us. How are we to know that none of those things can separate us from the love of God unless some of them try? And how can there be a story if we have no struggle against those things? How can there be a story if we do not learn the truth of what Paul has said, that none of those things separate us from the love of God?