Telling a Better Story

Story: it’s the new catchphrase of the church. Everyone is talking about how to tell a better story. Conferences are devoted to crafting stories and helping people to discover what their story is and how to craft their tale. After spending so much time hearing about story telling, I began wondering what my story is and more importantly, why would someone care to hear it? All I knew was the importance of story telling for sales in the skills I learned at the University of Washington studying sales. How could that be relevant to my life story though?

Donald Miller, one of the pioneers in this “story” craze, wrote a book about story- telling and discovering what your story is. In A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Donald Miller writes,

“If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation. If I got any comfort as I set out on my first story, it was that in nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He’s a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn’t change, the story hasn’t happened yet. And if story is derived from real life, if story is just condensed version of life then life itself may be designed to change us so that we evolve from one kind of person to another. ”

This is my life story. My story is one of transformation. My story is one where the protagonist has gone through his hurdles, he’s fallen down, he’s made his mistakes, but he’s always gotten back up stronger. Even when he was weak, he was still pressing forward. The climax of the story may not have been written yet, but the turning point, the place of maturity and transformation, has come.

Donald Miller later writes, “And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can’t go back to being normal; you can’t go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time.” I can’t go back to a meaningless life anymore. Being normal, a status-quo lifestyle, is so boring. That’s a story you already know the ending of. A good story is one where the reader makes their own connection in the end. I can’t tell you the ending of this life story, but I can tell you it’s gonna be a page turner.

A final Miller quote for you: “It wasn’t necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.”

What’s your story? Are you in a process of transformation or is your story too normal and needing a shift? Let’s not waste any more time.