The Only Story We Have To Tell Is Our Own

"The Only Story We Have To Tell Is Our Own"

Galatians 1:11-24

What's your story?

Life is about stories.  Life is about living out our story.  Sharing that story with others.  Our story is not just for us--even though it is our story.  Stories are meant to be told.

I subscribe to a journal called, "Creative NonFiction." Each story in this journal reads like an intriguing fictional story.  But not so.  The stories in "Creative Non-Fiction" are all true.  These stories actually happened to those who wrote them.  Each issue has a topic or a theme.  I am in awe as I read through each issue, at the stories people have lived and are now sharing through this magazine.

In one issue the theme is food.  In an article titled, “The Intimacy of Forks” by Liesl Schwabe, she writes about the joy of being a chef, and the simple pleasures of just setting a table for guests.  In her personal essay she wrote, “I like the way kitchens inherently promise possibility but also remind us of the measured, modest steps necessary to take one thing and make something else.”  Reading her article made me daydream about what it would be like to be a chef, and my own love of cooking that has gone latent these past years.

In another issue, J.D. Lewis wrote an essay about his work traveling around the world studying what are called “Lazarus Species.”  These species are ones thought extinct, but miraculously rise from extinction.  I daydreamed about what a life would be like traveling the world, and getting to tell the story of different plants and animals that we once thought were gone forever, but somehow rise again.

As I said, I am in awe.  But I am also (what would be the best word here), beleaguered.  No, that's not right.  A bit depressed.  More at feeling inconspicuous.  Low-key.  Low-profile.  Plain.  Ordinary.  Uneventful.  I am a bit jealous, not only that these people whose stories I read in "Creative Non-Fiction" are not only adventurous, out-going, and boarder line amazing, but they are written so well also.

That's the tag line of this magazine:  "True Stories, Well Told." I read those and I think, why don't I have some amazing stories to tell, that have happened in my life?  Why don't I have some great adventure to share?  Do these people have lots of stories--adventures that have happened?  Or, do they just have this one adventure and happened to get it published?  And why can't I write as well as some of these stories are written?

I have enough of an ego to think I could write as well as most of them I read.  I just don't think I have any interesting adventures to write about.  I think to myself that I have to get out there and live the adventure, to make up for my otherwise pedestrian kind of life I've lived so far.

I know my life has counted for something.  I know I have helped, and shepherded, and mentored and pastored a lot of people along the way.  I feel really good about that.  But there's been this marked lack of adventure, except for a mission trip to Guatemala where I came down with an awful case of dysentery.  And a month after returning, came down with Hepatitis A, that almost landed me on a liver transplant list.  I guess that's a story.

Paul had a story to tell.  And a pretty amazing story it was.  Unknown to him, his story would become his main witness.  That's how it goes with our stories.  They can be such a great form of witness.  Paul writes, here at the beginning of his letter to the Galatians, “Look, I’m not making this stuff up.  Jesus got a hold of me; turned my life upside down; sent me all over the world to preach the gospel.  Here’s what happened.  Here’s a few of the details.  It’s my story.  Not anyone else’s story.  It’s the best way I know how to get this message of Jesus across.”

For Paul, his story involved an early life of plowing along a set course.  He grew up in a privileged Jewish family.  They must have been wealthy, because Paul studied under Gamaliel, one of the most respected rabbi's in Jerusalem.  That kind of education, at Gamaliel’s school, wouldn't have been cheap.

It wasn’t just his education, though.  A large part of Paul’s education would have been from the 50 volumes of laws that were based on the 10 Commandments.  It wasn’t that Paul just studied those 50 volumes frontwards and backwards.  It was, as he wrote to the Galatians, “…I obeyed every law that our ancestors had given us” (vs. 14).  Paul meticulously studied and obeyed 50 volumes of laws.  And he tried to make everyone else do the same.  Including and especially the Christians who had no respect for any of it.

Then, BOOM! a blinding light from heaven, the Voice of God, Paul knocked to the ground off his horse, he goes blind for a few days, and his life is changed forever.  Then he spends the rest of his life traveling all over Asia Minor preaching the gospel and getting congregations started.  It’s an amazing story!

My coming-to-Jesus story is so much less so.  I was in 7th grade.  I was at a Snow Conference our presbytery put on in the Cascade mountains, east of Seattle.  My mom told me I had to go.  I didn’t ski.  I don’t ski.  I’ve skied once in my life, when I was an adult.  (That really is a story worth telling.)  I just didn’t see any point in going to this snow conference with a bunch of kids I didn’t know.  I had very few friends and none of them were going.

When most of the others went to ski for the day, I stayed back at the conference lodge.  And hung around.  And hung around.  And after I got done hanging around, I hung around some more.  At one point, believe it or not, I got bored.  So I bundled myself up like Charlie Brown in Winter, and walked down to a small village near the lodge.  I had some money my mom had given me, and I bought a box of chocolate covered cherries.  I think there were 20 in the box.  I ate them all.  In one sitting.

Early in the evening when the skiers were returning, I was hurling chocolate covered cherries in the boys bathroom.  You get the picture.  Do you think that was the beginning of my distaste for chocolate?

After dinner, which I didn’t eat, we were all sitting in the conference room, me much more pale and wrung out than when I started the day.  The speaker for the weekend was a guy who had a drum strapped to his back that he played with a wire hooked to his ankle.  He had a harmonica on a holder around his neck.  And he played the guitar.  All three at the same time.  (Mike can play the guitar and harmonica at the same time.  Now you just need to add the drum.) 

         Not only had I made myself sick, but I had gotten so negative about being there, I had made myself snarky as well.  “Oh, look,” I said to a small group of kids next to me.  “The circus has come to town.”  I was told to shut up.  And I think the word loser was thrown in there as well, from that group of kids.

So I did.  Shut up, that is.  When the guy stopped his singing circus act, he started talking.  And I started listening.  I’d never heard anything like it.  I’d never heard any one like him.  I don’t remember what he said.  I know he told us about Jesus.  Something about Jesus caring about us no matter what.

What I did hear was authenticity.  This guy was real.  It was the speaker’s genuineness that convinced me about Jesus.  I say, “telling me” because it was like he was talking to me and there was no one else in the room.  The other 50 or so junior high kids that were in the room became invisible, and the sincerity of his character was mine to soak up.

When he gave the altar call, which was just a suggestion we bow our heads, right where we were sitting, everyone in prayer, that if we wanted Jesus to be in our hearts, to just do that right then.  With my stomach still rumbling from heaving up a box of chocolate covered cherries, and my snarky attitude, I asked Jesus into my life.

No bright light knocking me off a horse.  No pedigree like Paul.  No life of leadership, as a rising star.  No voices out of the sky.  No temporary blindness.  Just a stupid 7th grader with a bad attitude and a majorly upset stomach.  Bowing my head, and saying, “Yes,” to Jesus.

That night when we boys were in our bunkbed section of the lodge, the speaker came in to say good night to us all.  I remember he knelt by my bunk and said a prayer for us all.  Beside my bunk and prayed.  It was the most true prayer I heard prayed, from the most authentic man I had ever met, whose words and demeanor were lined up by God himself.

When I got home from the Snow Conference, I’m sure my mom must have asked me how it went, and I’m sure I said something like most kids say to questions like that:  “It was OK.”  But I was different from that time on.  I could feel it.  Something had changed.

Paul knew something had changed as well.  But for him it was a stark change.  His before picture was one of a cruel persecutor of Christians.  He called himself a destroyer.  He was so misguidedly on fire for his religion that he hated everyone who wasn’t like him.  Which were mostly Christians.  So he set about to destroy Christian’s lives.  He ripped apart Christian families and had them thrown into prison.  Men, women, children.  He had believers killed in awful ways.

I had no before picture like that.  I was, and for the most part have been, a straight arrow kind of person.  I’ve never really acted out.  I was never a partier in high school or college or after.  I’ve never taken or used any kind of illicit drug.  I’ve never been drunk.  (When you grow up with a drunk, you see it isn’t an enviable kind of life.)  I was one of those boringly good kids.  So, at my acceptance of Jesus, I went from being a good kid, to being a good kid with Jesus in my life.

So why did I feel so bad when I was in high school and college?  Why did I feel like I should have had a dramatic conversion like Paul, and many of the other believers I had met at that time—the late 1960’s and early 1970’s?  I never had a story like some of them had, about coming down from a three year drug addicted high, gave their lives to Jesus, and Jesus healed their fried brains.  How come I didn’t have a story like that?  I almost felt like I had to make one up, just to fit in.  I was jealous of those who did have a Paul styled, knock-you-off-your-horse story that everyone oooed and awed at.

People would turn to me and ask me to share my coming to Jesus story.  I had no Voices from the sky.  No bright lights.  No gargantuan before and after picture.  All I had was, “I got sick on a box of chocolates and turned my life over to Christ.”

I finally had to come to realize, the only story we have to tell is our own, no matter what it is.  And be OK with that.

What Paul doesn’t tell us in this short snippet of his conversion story is that, once he went out on all his journeys, telling people about Jesus, starting churches, almost everyplace Paul went he was beat up.  Just for telling people about Jesus, just for following his sense of calling after he gave his life to Christ, Paul was stoned, beaten, imprisoned, left for dead, shipwrecked, bit by a viper.  Even though he had great adventures as an evangelist for Jesus, those great adventures led to his near death several times.

I guess I should be grateful.  In all my travels, and pastoring from church to church during my ministry, people haven’t tried to kill me.  Instead I get invited over for dinner!  I must be doing something wrong!

I could describe my life as a Christian, from the time of that Snow Conference, as extraordinarily ordinary.  I would guess most Christians might describe their coming-to-Jesus story in the same way.  No big splash.  Just an ordinary day, in an ordinary life, trying to live into an extraordinary event of inviting Jesus into your life.  And that’s OK.