The Power of Story
Listen: “The Story” by Brandi Carlile
On the weekend of October 13/14, 2018–about three weeks before I went to rehab on November 10, 2018–I delivered one of my last messages at Vineyard Church in Kansas City, MO, a church I founded in 1990 and pastored for over twenty-eight years. The message was entitled: The Intrigue of Story. I was trying to encourage people with the idea that no matter where you’ve been or what you have done—God loves you and your story matters. I had four simple points in the message:
Everybody loves a good story.
Jesus was a great story-teller.
God wants to use your story to encourage others.
Learn to share your story.
You never know how your story may help someone else through a challenging time in their life. Your story may provide the experience, strength, and hope that someone else needs in their darkest moments. Your story could literally save someone’s life, giving them the hope to live for a better day. But, there is an art to sharing your story in life-giving ways.
Through the years, I have observed a few ways to go about telling your story. One way is to choose only your best moments in life—stories where you are most successful, most wise, most charitable, most victorious, most generous, most loving—and share only the stories where you shine brightest, stories in which you are the hero. People can learn from your success stories. This is not a bad approach. People may want to learn how you successfully navigated graduate school, raised a family, started a business, or completed an ultra-endurance event, but beware—a little of this goes a long way. And besides, the best success stories are peppered with challenges and setbacks.
Another approach to telling your story is to be open and honest about your struggles, even some of your deepest, darkest struggles. Everybody has them. After pastoring thousands of people over four decades on multiple continents, I have learned that everyone who has lived long enough has experienced pain and shame, insecurities and weaknesses, struggles and obsessions, anxieties and fears. Our greatest joys are punctuated with our greatest sorrows. So, a key to telling your story in a life-giving way may be a little counterintuitive to some, but it usually starts with getting honest and vulnerable. Here are three simple questions which can guide you in learning to share your story in a life-giving way:
What was your life like before you experienced one of your most difficult setbacks or challenges?
What experiences have given you hope in your darkest hours?
What have you learned and how are you growing through difficulties you have faced?
As a pastor, I was always trying to provide a grace-based community for people to experience spiritual hope and transformation in their darkest hours. I was always cultivating an atmosphere in which people shared their stories honestly, even featuring inspirational personal stories in my messages. I always encouraged people to share their stories in this fashion because it just might touch someone in a life-giving way at just the right moment.
Over the last three years, I have watched the power of story-telling literally save lives in the recovery community. In fact, it’s even more pronounced in the recovery community as compared to church. People show up at church for a variety of reasons, sometimes (but not always) sporting their Sunday best with plastic smiles. People never show up at a recovery meeting when everything is going well in life. No Sunday best. No plastic smiles. Usually, their “ass is on fire” (a phrase I heard in recovery meetings) and their life is crumbling around them. They may be close to losing their career, their family, or teetering on the edge of prison time or death itself.
The beautiful thing about recovery meetings is that everybody in the meeting showed up when their “ass was on fire,” and they keep coming to meetings to maintain their sobriety and encourage others with their story. The recovery community is life-giving through the stories of people who have been through hell, have had a spiritual awakening, have worked the Twelve Steps, and have continued in community sharing their experience, strength, and hope. It’s beautiful and transforming.
The Big Book of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) is divided into two sections: (1) the first 164 pages which lay out the philosophy of AA and the Twelve Steps; and (2) the next 388 pages of inspirational personal stories. Each story follows the simple outline I mentioned above: life circumstances which led to alcoholism (or gambling, overeating, etc.), finding hope in the recovery community, and walking out the steps to recovery. Inspirational stories are not only found in the Big Book. Every person in recovery has their own story of hope which they freely share with others. Over the last three years, I have heard hundreds of inspirational, personal stories of recovery. Some of them are truly miraculous.
I recently read a story in the Big Book entitled “My Bottle, My Resentments, and Me.” It’s a story about a boy who grew up in a small town in America whose mother was murdered when he was eleven years old. (I’ll call him Bill for clarity.) Bill started drinking. The trauma led to Bill drinking his way through high school, drinking his way through the marines to an honorable discharge, and drinking his way out of his family. He became a homeless drunk, living life as a hobo hopping freight trains between large cities for the next many years. He lost all contact with his father, siblings, and children. One day in a drunken stupor, he moaned, “Oh, God! Please help me.” Sometime later he was living with an alcoholic barmaid and ended up bumping into one of his old hobo friends who was clean and sober. He thought if his friend could sober up, so could he. He and his girlfriend started attending an AA meeting which led to years of recovery, service work, and leadership in AA.
One day a friend who wrote for a living asked if he could write up his story for a magazine article. Bill approved as long as he remained anonymous. It just so happened that his long-lost brother and sister-in-law in his small hometown happened to read the article in the magazine. Even though the article didn’t mention Bill’s name, it mentioned the city where he was living. His brother hunted him down and they finally connected. Bill had falsely assumed that his family would never want to see him again. Bill had not spoken to his family in thirty years. This led to a family reunion back in his hometown. His father had passed away, but he was joyfully reunited with his own children, with his siblings, and with his previously unknown nephews and nieces.
He called it a modern-day miracle. God had done for him what he could not do for himself. He said, “I believe that I am living proof of the A.A. saying ‘Don’t give up until the miracle happens’” (p. 445).
Your story matters.
Shalom
©realfredherron, 2022
