I first read about the concept of living a better story in Donald Miller’s book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. Despite our failings in life, we can always grab hold of a second chance and redeem the time we have left on this spinning ball of clay. My take on living a better story has to do with a theme I continue to push in most of my writing, that being, “living a redemptive life.”
I closely tie this theme to the admonition of Socrates, who said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Living the examined life is ultimately the same as living a redemptive life. The examined life brings us to the threshold of truth and virtue (Plato called it the “Good”), and to embrace truth and virtuous living is to truly redeem the time we have left. Thus begins the process of living a better story.
Everyone has a story to tell, and who knows, we may each have the life experiences to write a Pulitzer Prize winner. The problem is that too many people do not even recognize the story living with them, the nuggets of wisdom and ideas that have emerged merely from living life, and learning from it.
This notion was driven home to me by a history Professor I had at Michigan State University during my time in graduate school. It was a seminar on Colonial historiography, and we were required to read ten different books on various aspects of this period of history. At the beginning of the first class, the professor had us break up into pairs, and interview each other. The exercise was three-fold. One, to get to know our fellow students. Two, demonstrate to us that history is about an ongoing story, so-to-speak, and Three, enlighten us to the understanding that within each of us is a story worth telling. In other words, we are living history.
It wasn’t until I encountered Donald Miller that I began to see the truth in this kind of thinking, and that if I am living a story, then I should make it the best story of my life.
Think about where you are at on this journey and ask yourself the question, “Am I really living the best story of my life?” Perhaps you’re living a story with which you are disappointed, and unable to find where you fit in the patchwork of existence. Others may be living a story of bitter endings, and a world of unforgiveness . There may be some of you who have had little about which to be bitter, disappointed, or discouraged. If so, you are fortunate to have had these experiences in your life’s story. But the question is, what do we need to do in order to live a better story?
Everyone’s story is different, and that means we each have to examine our lives for the issues that consume us. If bitterness is driving each chapter we write, then we need to stop and acknowledge this fact, and do some serious self-assessment as to why we continue to hold grudges against others. This has been especially true in the story of my life, beginning somewhere in my childhood. Somewhere along the way I stopped forgiving people for the hurts I believed they foisted upon me. After a while, I began enjoying the feeling of being hurt perhaps because it gave me further justification for who I was, and it also gave me license to wallow in my own self-pity. It’s like I was a doomed leper scratching my wounds in a sort of self-tormenting, masochistic way (to quote Helmut Thielicke’s book, Nihilism)
Thank God that I eventually examined my life out of this, and have been able to forgive, and ask forgiveness for all the garbage of the past. I finally came to the conclusion that the yoke of bitterness is far too heavy a burden to carry, and that living a bitter life is in no way compatible with living a better story. It might be interesting to read the story of a bitter person (ie. Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov), but you would be hard pressed to find anyone who believes such a life story is redemptive.
So what’s your story? As you assess where you are and where you’ve been in life, can you say it’s the best story you’ve lived? What kind of stumbling blocks lay in the path of your existence? Think about the gifts and abilities you possess, and then consider how they can be utilized in a way that not only makes your part of the garden a cultivated, but contributes to the ability of others to live a better story as well.
I recently experienced a heartbreaking loss of a relationship to a wonderful woman with whom I thought I would spend the rest of my life. It came out of nowhere, and devastated me to the core of my being. I’m still hurting beyond measure, but I have had the chance to reflect and figure it into the ongoing commitment to live a better story, and life. God has His own way of making our paths straight, and bringing us to the place where we should be. “The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps.” (Proverbs 16:9).
No matter how old we are, what we’ve failed to do, or the time we’ve wasted, God will always find a way to make the crooked paths straight, and help us make a redemptive novel out of our broken lives.
I once met a man so vile and crude he would make a drunken sailor blush. He was about as rotten to the core as a person could be. I lost track of him over the years (no loss for me, however), yet one day ran into him at a local bluegrass concert in Michigan. I hardly recognized him because his eyes were filled with light, rather than the darkness I remembered. He told me the story of how he was brought to the realization one night as to how low he had sunk in his humanity (I paraphrase here). Apparently he was introduced to the idea that he was not too far gone, and that God could still make a masterpiece out of a broken life. He found Christ, and his life was transformed into something all of his old friends did not recognize. They were all thinking of the old Larry, and couldn’t believe the new Larry they saw. He told me, “It’s as if God made a new me!” He was truly a transformed man indeed. It reminds of the promise God made to Israel through the Prothet Joel. “And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten.” (Joel 2:25).
We get many chances in this life to change our stories, and to live more redemptive lives. Take some time today to self-examine the core of your life. What you believe, what you value most, and what you desire to accomplish. Does it add up to a better story for you? Is it a story you would be happy to share? I’ll stop now so you can being writing.
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