Fly Forward

I was browsing the bookstore the other day, as I love to do. I was struck with the amount of Memoirs that could be found. Everywhere I looked there was a beautiful looking cover that contained the story of someone. Most of the people writing memoirs I've never even heard of. They are everyday people with remarkable stories to tell....true stories and events in the lives of these people. More and more people are entrusting other people with the intimate details of story. What a beautiful thing. We need to hear and share in one another's stories.

If you're a writer and you are stuck in your writing, begin by telling some part of your story. Even if you're not planning on revealing a best-selling memoir; even if you must deviate from your current project, begin to write some of the events that happened to you. Writing some scene from your life may help to get you moving in your current work. The work of writing your personal story does a lot of things. It may jar a memory and bring in some workable material. More than that, it helps to bring you in touch with humanity. Your own humanity. It is good to be human. Jesus celebrated our humanity when He became one of us. Even back in the garden, He declared it to be good. Telling and writing our story helps ourselves connect with our own humanity in an authentic, genuinely sincere way. Frederick Beuchner says, "We are men and women of sincerity, Paul says, and God help us if we're not because that's what we're cracked up to be, and sincerity you'd like to think would be the least of it. We are commissioned by God to speak in Christ, and to speak in Christ is to speak truth, and there is no story whose truth we are closer to than our own, than the story of what it's like to live inside ourselves. The trouble is that, like Christ's story, this too is apt to be the last we tell, partly because we are uncomfortable with it and afraid of sincerity and partly because we have half forgotten it. But tell it we must and, before we tell it to anbody else, tell it first of all to ourselves and keep on telling it because unless we do, unless we live with, and out of, the story of who we are inside ourselves, we lose track of who we are. We live so much on the outer surface and seeming of our lives and our faith that we lose touch with the deep places that they both come from."

Maybe Buechner got something we're just starting to get....story is important....it's important to tell and it's important to hear the stories of others. I think people are hungry for this sharing of humanity and it's becoming apparent as I visit the bookstore. It seems to me to be a universal language that all can understand: the power of storytelling......the human story. Tell your story! Write your story! If even to remind yourself of the deep, deep beauty of a life lived....your life; your perspective and the most accurate one there is!