7 – Your Story is Their Story

MODULE SEVEN

Core Question

How has your story brought you to where you are today?

Core Practice

Develop the ability to reach back into the past and imagine a new future, in order to live differently in the present – all through the act of telling your own story.

We all know a truly good story when we hear one. There’s actually a good reason for this. Movies like The Shawshank Redemption, Groundhog Day, Toy Story, Bridesmaids —the reason they are all great movies is because they are all really great stories.

We’re drawn to them because they offer us a look at something universal, expressed through a very specific lens. My wife, who is a screenwriter, studied a guy named Robert McKee, and he describes story like this:

“The archetypal story unearths a universally human experience, then wraps itself inside a unique, culture-specific expression.”

Really good stories have a common set of principles, almost like a formula. Understanding these principles helps us better understand the way around the stories we are creating, and more importantly, the stories we are living.

Now, settle into a comfy chair as you enter into Module Seven. Be forewarned that the reading is a bit lengthy considering you’re reading this on a screen, but trust me, you’ll thank yourself for forging ahead!

THE INCITING INCIDENT

The first principle of really great storytelling is called the Inciting Incident. It’s the moment in a character’s life that disrupts everything, moving life from stasis into action. It’s the moment that turns everything upside down. For the sake of this Module, let’s just say that our collective story’s inciting incident was the Fall. It’s when Eve ate the apple. It’s when everything got turned upside down.

PROGRESSIVE COMPLICATIONS

The next great principle of a really good story is what we call Progressive Complications, or the ever-increasing obstacles the character faces as she tries to get what she wants.

You could also call it “life.”

As a result of our inciting incident, these Progressive Complications turn into what becomes the essential factor for really great stories:

CONFLICT

Most of us run from conflict, but when it comes to stories, conflict is the bread and butter. Because without conflict, nothing would ever happen – for good or for bad. In fact, it is only when we embrace the conflict in our own stories that we are given the opportunity to change and become the people we were created to become.

“The general pattern in story and novel is that heroes learn and grow from encountering their shadow, whereas villains never do. Invariably, the movies and novels that are most memorable show real ‘character development’ and growing through shadow work. This inspires us all because it calls us all. As Carl Jung put it so well, ‘Where you stumble and fall, there you find pure gold.’” – Falling Upward, Fr. Richard Rohr

MOVING INWARD

So, we’ve got the basic tenets of storytelling, but what on earth does this have to do with our own stories, or with making better art, for that matter?

It’s when we realize how the principles of storytelling can dramatically shape and form our own stories that we begin to see their power.

We’ve agreed we share an inciting incident (the Fall), which we can agree has led to progressive complications (a cursory read through the scriptures supports this), which, in turn, has led to conflict (have you looked at CNN today?).

Thus, we’re attempting to create redemptive stories in the midst of a conflicted world.

Ronald Rolhesier sums up our dilemma really nicely when he says this:

“We are fired into life with a madness that comes from our incompleteness.”

I don’t know about you, but I feel this incompleteness fairly often. My heart aches. I’m restless. And at the end of most days, I’m left wanting more.

Any chance you feel this way as well?

Maybe you’re aching because of something you said or something that was said to you. Maybe you’re longing to have made some different choice about something you did earlier today. Maybe you’re aching with anxiety about bills that are due at the end of the month. Maybe your body is physically in pain.

And so all of this aching, according to Rolheiser, is because we’re incomplete. It’s because we aren’t whole. And since the Fall, things are not the way they should be.

TIME OUT

In your workbook, answer the following:

In what way(s) are you most acutely aware of your incompleteness?

In what way(s) are you desperately longing for wholeness in your life?

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR, DONALD MILLER

Don is the author of several books and is one of the most amazing guys I know. He has devoted his entire life to telling stories and helping people do the same – specifically, how to tell their own stories well. I got the chance to sit down with him on Skype and chat about story, books, branding, and being vulnerable. Enjoy!

TOWARD WHOLENESS

For us to become better humans and to make better art, we must first get to the bottom of this incompleteness. Only when we arrive at the understanding of our incompleteness can we integrate our life with our art.

So a question: how do we move toward wholeness?

The only way I know is to tell stories.

Through song, poetry, dance, paint, imagery, and through the redemption of our very own past.

We move toward wholeness by telling our stories to one another: in small groups, in counselor offices, over meals, at recovery groups, to our children.

Because, when we tell our stories to one another, we remind each other that this isn’t all there is. When we speak of our ache, our restlessness, our incompleteness, we remind each other that there is, in fact, more.

The first story I want to tell you is about a slave and a master, and it comes from Genesis 16.

At the beginning of our story, Sarah and Abraham have been trying to conceive for 10 years. To be barren in the ancient world was a tragedy worse than death. Under pressure to bear a son, Sarah gives her slave, Hagar, to Abraham as a second wife in hopes that Hagar might be able to do what Sarah simply could not. Almost immediately, Hagar becomes pregnant. And almost as quickly, Hagar begins to despise her mistress.

Now, any time wives suggest their husbands sleep with other women, things are bound to get complicated. The Bible is no exception.

Sarah is mad at Abraham because Hagar is mad at her, and things get really messy. Hagar is trapped. She’s at the end of her rope: “I’m a slave carrying my master’s baby.” And she asks:

Is this it?

Is this all I’m living for?

There must be more.

And so, in the middle of the night, she dashes away into the mist. Confused, afraid, alone.

TIME OUT

In your workbook, answer the following:

What does it look like when you try to ‘escape’? In therapy circles we call this ‘disassociating.’ Naming (or reminding yourself of) the ways in which you escape is an important step to this process! In other words, how do you try to wriggle out of your story when things get uncomfortable?

Now, back to our story…

Stumbling through the darkness, she arrives at a river bed.

A blast of light. The ground shakes. Out of the nighttime air, an Angel of the Lord appears and asks her two amazing questions:

Where have you come from? Where are you going?

There aren’t any more basic questions that could be asked about one’s past and one’s future.

Think about those questions:

Where have you come from?

Where are you going?

Where were you when you got the phone call? Where were you when your dad left? Where were you when you were pregnant the first time? Where were you when you had your third miscarriage? Where were you when everything went to hell? When you didn’t get into the school you wanted? When the answer was “no”?

“Where were you?” is asking you, “Where are you from?”

If we are to become whole like we all so desperately want, if we want to become whole through the healing power of Christ, the journey begins when we start asking those two questions.

God wasn’t asking Hagar this question for His own good. He knew where she’d been: She’d been a slave.

He knew where she was going: She was trying to escape.

What He’s doing is giving her a chance to answer. And He’s giving us a chance to answer as well.

Where have you come from?

Where are you going?

Even as I come to those questions today, I’m baffled.

If it were me, standing by the riverside, trying to answer God, I think I would just go back to the beginning.

ACT I: LIFE

I was born in Fargo, North Dakota, on January 29, in the middle of a blizzard. Our family moved to Blaine, Minnesota, when I was six, where I was raised beneath a water tower that bore my name. A pure coincidence.

I realized that I liked telling stories when I was nine years old doing a community theater production of the Wizard of Oz at the Blaine High School Community Theater. Again, a pure coincidence.

Before I believed I was a storyteller, though, I tried my hand at sports.

I tried baseball, but I have a really small head. The hats were always too big, and I singlehandedly lost dozens of games because I could never see the ball. So in fourth grade, I tried football, but the pads weighed nearly as much as I did. So then I tried soccer, where I came so close to being only moderately disappointing.

And then came hockey.

In Minnesota, hockey is pretty much a rite of passage. In fact, it’s nearly a law that all young boys must play. There are rumors of babies leaving the hospital wearing ice skates. Like the other sports, I wasn’t very good. But I was fast. However, I never really learned to stop.

My first year, I was given a trophy. It wasn’t even a participation award; it was an actual trophy given for an actual skill. The plaque read: “Kamikaze Award.” Because the only way I could stop was by running into things.

I struggled to make the C team freshman year, and later that season broke both of my collarbones. It became clear that my frame was not built for high-impact anything.

I was much more at home on the stage than on the field. And so, rather than try to become really good at this thing that I wasn’t good at, I decided then and there that I wanted to be a professional actor.

So, I worked really, really hard, and that’s exactly what happened.

ACT II: DEATH

Flash forward 16 years: It’s 2005. I’m living in Chicago.

It’s a beautiful October day, and I’m driving down I-90, and I’m heading to a show. I had just deposited a check for an acting gig that officially made me a working actor. It was the kind of thing that lead me to think, I could pay my rent doing this.

So, I’m driving downtown, and I’m thinking of all the things I said I wanted to do. I wanted to be a professional actor. I wanted to pay my bills from acting. I wanted to work at this theater. I wanted to be on TV. All these things had happened. And then all of a sudden I find myself frustrated, asking the same question Hagar asked before she ran away:

Is this it? Is this all there is? Is there more?

Months later, I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of glass breaking, and a car alarm far off down the street. Without getting up, I went back to sleep. In the morning, I woke up and realized that it had been my car. It had been broken into, and the radio had been stolen. The next night, the exact same thing: breaking glass, everywhere. This time it wasn’t my car; it was actually something inside of me that had started to fall apart.

I was having a panic attack.

I was pacing. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t get my heart rate down. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like I was going to die.

So, I jumped into my car. I drove myself to the ER. In a snowstorm. With no windows. In the days and weeks that followed, I had a total meltdown. And all along, I kept asking: What is going on? Why is this happening?

And so, after a bizarre series of events, I called my agent and said, “I need to take a couple years off.” I packed my bags. My now-wife, Margaret, helped me drive out to Seattle, where I started seminary.

It was there that I first heard about Hagar. And it was there that I finally began to discover why I had started to fall apart.

SOMETHING’S ALWAYS BREWING

If you live in Chicago, you are familiar with lake-effect storms. They’re storms that come from the west, then hit Lake Michigan and turn into nastier storms that come back to haunt us instead of going to the nice people in Michigan. My lake effect happened the night that everything fell apart. The tragic storm that caused it happened long before then.

Another part of a great story is being surprised along the way.

You see, I haven’t actually told you my whole story. I haven’t actually told you where I’m from.

What I haven’t told you yet is that I was sexually abused by two older boys when I was 10.

What I haven’t told you yet is that my dad was an alcoholic, and struggled with many addictions.

What I haven’t told you yet is that I followed suit in many ways. My drug of choice wasn’t in a bottle, but was online, as well as off.

What I haven’t told you yet is that I believed in God my whole life, but I wasn’t acting like it at all. What I haven’t told you is that I was in desperate need of help.

What I haven’t told you yet is that, though I had become a professional actor, I had also become a professional addict.

Now, back to Hagar. She’s pregnant. She’s alone, weary, standing beside the river. And God has just asked her, Where have you come from? Where are you going? Her response was simple: I’m running away. And just like Hagar, I ran too. I ran from the shame and from the pain of my childhood.

And I ran so very hard—all the while, crying out:

“I’m running away!”

And now to you: Has something so terrible ever been done to you that you wanted to do the same thing as Hagar? The same thing I did? Maybe a better question is, have you ever done something so terrible—something that you didn’t want anyone to see—and all you could think to do was run?

I want to tell you a secret I’ve learned.

It’s in these places of darkness and tragedy, it’s in the midst of our running, it’s when we are standing by the river, out of breath, desperate to disappear, that God quietly waits for a response.

The questions themselves are remarkable, but the way God asks them together is what intrigues me. God isn’t asking for a travelogue. God’s asking for an account of our stories—the good and the bad—inviting us to name and give weight to our story, our ache that is born from our incompleteness.

Why would God care where we’ve come from? Why would God care where we’re going? Because He knows that the answers to these questions are life-altering, if we are brave enough to follow them where they lead.

I found myself in Seattle, at a seminary. And it was there that my professor, Dan Allender, taught me something about how we interpret time. You see, we often think of time like this: past-present-future. It’s linear. It’s past-present-future. We used to be “past.” And now we’re “present.” Later, we’ll be “future.” But what if we saw time in another way?

What if we saw time like this:

This is actually a truer sense of time, and it’s the way most of us operate without even knowing it. What we often do is we take all that has ever been done to us in the past, whatever we’ve done, and then we believe or fear that that thing is going to happen again in the future. And however we imagine the future is how we live in the present.

Example:

Past—I was terrible at sports as a kid. Future—I am positive that I will be bad at sports as an adult. Present—therefore, I shouldn’t teach Ruby how to throw a ball, because everyone will laugh at her.

Frederick Buechner writes,

“Memory is more than a looking back to a time that is no longer; it is a looking out to another kind of time altogether where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with the life that is in it still.”

There are those of us who are holding on to the past, unable to imagine a new future, and then there are those of us who can’t wait for tomorrow to happen and refuse to reconcile our past. But God is asking Hagar, and God is asking you and me, to hold both questions at the same time.

Because He knows that those questions hold the key to our restlessness, the key to our ache, the key to our desire. And the answer is found not in the past and not in the future, but right now. In the middle of them. But it only happens if we’re willing to look at our whole stories—the comedy and the tragedy.

Our story with Hagar isn’t over yet. God tells Hagar that she should go back to her mistress, live there for a while, have her son, call him Ishmael, and eventually she will be freed and she will be blessed.

So Hagar stands there— an Egyptian, not a Jew—having survived looking into the face of God, and what she does next is simply unheard of. She gives God a name. Not at any other time in the scriptures does a human actually name God, and yet here, in the middle of the night, by a river, a pregnant Egyptian slave girl sweetly names God El Roi, which translates as “the God who sees.”

The God who sees where I came from, and where I’m going. Standing at the river, there is no judgment, no condemnation, no law. There is only grace. Standing with Hagar, we get a tiny glimpse of the God who will come as a baby generations from now.

Later in the Bible, David pens an eloquent illustration of this. He says:

Is there anyplace I can go to avoid your spirit?

to be out of your sight?

If I climb to the sky, you’re there!

If I go underground, you’re there!

If I flew on mornings wings to the far western horizon,

You’d find me in a minute—

you already there waiting!

Then I said to myself, “Oh, he even sees me in the dark!”

At night I’m immersed in the light!

It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to you;

night and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to you.

Psalm 139:7-12

ACT III: DEATH

Eventually, a good story comes to a place where all hope is lost. And this is when a character decides whether or not to change. The moments of crisis build to a climax, and then, like in all engaging stories, lead to a resolution, and we walk out of the theater. But in real life, this part of the story can take much longer and be difficult to navigate.

Growing up, I was always the kid everyone took to their “Heaven’s Gates, Hell’s Flames” performances. I was the kid everyone took to their youth groups and their Billy Graham crusades. And every seat that I sat on held a boy who had lost all hope. So, every time the teacher spoke up and asked us to come forward, I raised my hand, walked to the altar and wept like a baby. I have been saved, literally, 3,000 times.

When I ask those famous questions of my story—where have I come from and where am I going?—the answers are quite clear: I’ve come from a painful past that is being redeemed. This redemption is allowing me to imagine a brave new future, which is causing me to live very differently today.

Where have I come from? Where am I going? I have come from being dismembered by my abuse and by myself countless times, and I am moving toward being re-membered by being resurrected by Jesus Christ even more times than that. I am coming from darkness and I am slowly, inch by inch, being moved toward the light. And while I still ache deeply, just like you; while I’m restless many nights, just like you; while I’m constantly reminded of my incompleteness, just like you; and even though I sometimes wish that I could separate myself from El Roi, a God who sees everything, I simply cannot. And neither can you.

I left out one principle of a really, really great story.

Before you can have your resolution or your climax, your crisis or your progressive complications, your conflict or even your inciting incident, you must have your exposition.

Exposition explains to your audience the world your character inhabited before the disruption. And so now, let me ask you a new question: Where, really, have we come from? Let me tell you: it was a garden. It was a place of paradise. We people were created in the image of God to live without pain, shame, or aches of any kind. We came from wholeness.

And the final element to a really great story? A twist at the end.

You think you know where everything is headed, and then all of a sudden everything changes, and you see everything in a new light. So, where really are we going? It’s to a place where the world is finished, where there is no pain, shame, or aches of any kind. We are going to a place where there is no madness. Where everything is complete. So, if this is where we really have come from, and this is where we really are going, shouldn’t that do something really dramatic to how we live today?

There is more to life. For me and my house, we have found that this lies smack dab in the middle of two questions asked of this audacious slave girl who named our very own Lord “the God who sees us,” just as we are. Right here. Right now.

CREATIVITY AND IMAGINATION REDEFINED

This summer, I was invited to give a talk at the Praxis conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma: a collaboration of academics, artists, and authors focused on reclaiming the historical church’s priority on liturgy, art and sacred space into the modern day evangelical context.

The talk below helps to contextualize much of the content you’ve just read, so snuggle up and get ready for some theology and sight gags. Enjoy!

FINAL QUESTIONS

In your workbook, answer the following:

If you were bold enough to begin to understand where you have come from and practice imagining a different future, how might that change how you are living right now? In other words, what ways are you hoping you’d live differently in the present (i.e. with less fear or anxiety; with more hope; with less addiction; etc.)

Now, reflect on where you have come from and where you are going. What were your inciting incidents? Where have you encountered conflict? And where has that conflict led you or where is it leading you right this very minute? Just make a quick list of the first things that come to mind.

Next, spend some time this week writing your story. Start with where you grew up, and name a core moment or two that you feel has defined your life. While you don’t need to go to your deepest, darkest places, don’t miss out by avoiding hard or painful moments. It’s possible that doing this module may have stirred up some feelings and emotions you didn’t know were there. If this is the case, seek some counsel to find a great therapist or spiritual director to help.

Finally, take a moment, look back at your creed, and then write it out on the top of the page. How is your story and your creed (your why) connected? These connections will propel you into our final week together.

ADDITIONAL READING & RESOURCES