Owning Our Stories

For the past few months I have been working on a spiritual memoir for Thomas Nelson Publishers that I expect will come out in the late spring or summer of 2011. The working title is This Much I Know. My friend Gareth Higgins says he’ll never speak to me again if this title ends up on the cover. He said only someone like Liza Minnelli could get away with writing a memoir with that title.

Gareth has the spiritual gift of encouragement.

So why write a spiritual memoir? People write memoirs because they want to make sense of their lives. It works. Literally as you write, you find yourself following the footprints of grace through your life and discovering God in places you hadn’t expected. You also find yourself asking why he seemed to be absent in other places as well.

One thing I have learned in this process is how important it is to “own your story.” I haven’t always done this well, and I fight the temptation to disown parts of my story everyday when I sit at my computer to write. The truth is we all have a past that is filled with mistakes we regret. Others have wounded us, sometimes profoundly, and we’ve done our share of inflicting pain on others and ourselves along the way as well. But rather than own our stories in their totality, most of us engage in some form historical revisionism. We edit out the parts of our past stories we don’t want to own.

Have you ever heard an actor in an interview bemoan the fact that a scene in a movie they just made didn’t make it into the final version of the film, a scene they really loved? In film making they say it, “ended up on the cutting room floor.” Writing this memoir I’m learning that there is a film editor in our hearts who snips away at the films of our lives, often choosing to leave the more painful parts (and even a bunch of the wonderful parts) on the editing room floor of our soul. I know firsthand that there is an enormous danger in not owning our whole stories, namely, if you don’t own your whole story, it will start to own you.

When you leave the most painful pieces on the editing room floor and don’t acknowledge they really happened, you literally become dis-integrated. To accept as a whole package the totality of everything we’ve done and that’s been done to us; to name it, own it, grieve it, celebrate it, this is where Shalom is found. Its also hell getting there.

Here’s one last thing I’m learning. Every life is revelatory. Your and my story reveals to others something about the heart of God that no one else’s life story can reveal. In a sense I can’t fully know God without knowing something about your life story. Your life is revelatory of God’s love, his ability to heal and redeem. Even his ability to work through his apparent absence.

We owe it to share our stories with each other in appropriate places, ways, and times. When we do, others will see the thread of grace in our lives and be able to say, “So that’s what the heart of God is like. That’s how he works.” I guess what I’m trying to say is that I am not sure any of us have exclusive proprietary rights to our life stories. At some level they belong to all of us. I know this might hack off lawyers who specialize in intellectual property rights, but I think this is how it works in the economy of God.

Of course, there is a time for everything. Now may not be the right time to tell our story to anyone. Maybe we still have work to do before we’re ready or we don’t have the right community to tell it to yet. That’s OK. You’ll know when its time.

Fredrick Buechner wrote a book titled, A Room Called Remember. Here’s a relevant passage from it.

“To remember my life is to remember countless times when I might have given up, gone under, when humanly speaking I might have gotten lost beyond the power of any to find me. But I didn’t. I have not given up. And each of you, with all the memories you have and the tales you could tell, you also have not given up…So in the room called Remember it is possible to find peace—the peace that comes from looking back and remembering to remember that though most of the time we failed to see it, we were never really alone.”