Many of you have been asking for an excerpt from “What’s Your Story?”
So here goes….
A Story Worth Telling
“Every life has a story” A & E Biography
With one word, one sentence, one page… Each chapter of our life is unfolding into a story. Our lives are very real; they are not works of fiction. With each new day the elements of our individual stories over-lap and continue to develop. Our settings change, our characters grow, and our plots thicken.
As a little girl I use to love to sit around my aunts and listen to the stories of their youth…they made me laugh, think and sometimes ponder about myself. Now I am the aunt. I am also a mother and grandmother, and I still enjoy hearing the stories of others. Wondrously, all of these stories are now included in the pages of my story. In the same manner, your life has affected someone else’s story- as someone else’s story has affected yours.
How our story plays out and how it reads changes over time. Although our stories are biographical they can be written in various ways. One chapter may read as a front page headline: Student Selected for College; Woman Receives Unexpected Blessing; Missionaries Arrested in Africa! Another chapter may be written as an advertisement buy line: “When it rains its pours!”, “Built Ford Tough!”, “We’re behind you every step of the way”. Or there may be lines that are hastily scribbled ‘classified ads’: “Help Wanted- Single over-worked mom needs help, washing, cleaning, carpooling, homework. Please call- sanity at risk!”
I truly believe our life is an epic. An epic is defined as a long narrative story or poem told in a dignified style about the deeds of a traditional or historical hero. It would be awesome to have my life written in poetry, with a beautiful rhyme scheme that flows peacefully along like a never-forgotten melody. But let’s face it that would be a poetic fairy tale. So, I prefer prose, as I am a woman of many words. I don’t think my story could be limited to rhyme anyway. I am not too sure about the dignified style either because there have been many times my story has become a “laugh until you cry” tragic comedy. The book of Revelations says, “…we defeat the enemy by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony.” Our testimony is our story, whether it is prose or poetry. It tells of our day- to- day victories, the exploits and deeds we have done, what we have seen and heard, and what we have witnessed thus far.These are all etched into the pages of our life…