How We Tell a Story Shows Who We’ve Allowed to Shape It.
In my last year of college, I decided to move into a studio apartment in a not-so-desirable neighborhood of Santa Cruz. I remember being somewhat uneasy about the neighborhood because the pavement was uneven and because the street looked like a scene out of some indie movie tragedy. I found out later that my suspicions were correct: my neighbor, on the day I was moving out, told me that two people had died in a drive-by shooting the year before and the year before that, the person who lived in the unit next to me had died in his sleep from a terminal illness.
I was just thankful he told me this on my last day there.
It was the first time I had ever lived completely by myself. Being an introvert, I thought it would be glorious. But I quickly realized that being alone seven days out of the week is also a very lonely time, introvert or not. Even though I was busy, I was lonely. To be honest, I felt like I was going a little crazy, because no human is ever designed to live completely in isolation for an extended period of time. I would eat Little Caesar’s five days out of the week, and after about a month I had a leaning tower of pizza boxes next to my front door. I remember thinking that whoever invented YouTube had probably saved my life.
But that season of loneliness slowly began to transform into solitude. I remember eating dinner by myself every night, and then I began to imagine what it would have been like to eat with Jesus, because Jesus never turned down a free meal. People always found him eating with the ‘undesirables,’ who were probably very lonely. And I was very lonely.
I remember transforming my prayers from the generic ‘Lord, today I praise thee’ into prayers of conversation, where I would talk to God as though he were sitting across from me on the bus, and where he would respond and we would talk to one another on the ride to school. I remember riding my scooter from campus after work, down three miles to my apartment, feeling the wind on my face and the words being carried on a breeze, and the unmistakable sensation in my bones of being accompanied by Someone.
Looking back, as lonely as that period was, I found myself utterly and completely dependent on God for His friendship, for His presence, for His love. I don’t think I would have traded that year alone with him for anything else, because I began to understand that God was a relational Being, someone who enjoyed spending time with me. In the words of Eugene Peterson, God does not abandon us to our loneliness and our chaos—he enters into it to save us, to fix us, to meet with us. And we find that our pain can be redeemed for something greater: a better story.
I was reading an article on BBC the other day about how and why we retain painful memories, and one part of the article stuck out to me:
“Decades of psychological research on memory show that we reconstruct memories slightly differently every time we recall them. Our memories are not like a DVD library which we can browse through, replaying any past event exactly as it happened—instead, the context of the original memory and the way we tell the story each time makes a difference.”
As humans, we are designed with the power to shape our own story—and we shape our stories by the way we tell it. How I choose to remember and retell that period of my life leads me to the unmistakable establishment of a true friendship with God. And if we believe He is good, that He loves us, that He is on our side, then the way we begin to remember the past and tell the stories about ourselves can actually rewrite what we remember. The prophet Isaiah talks about God giving us beauty for ashes, joy for doom, and I can’t help but think that when we choose to tell a story where God is for us—not against us—then we actually begin to mend the past. That our pain has not been wasted. That our chaos, with the help of God, can actually become Eden.
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