Every person tells themselves a story. This story comes from our real core beliefs and world view. This will be the large "philosophy" of our life. It may well be related to our religious faith and our deepest convictions. But as Jim Loehr points out in The Power of Story these life stories control our personal experience of our worlds.
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One of the unique things about human beings is that we tell stories. Put ten people around a camp fire and within minutes they will tell stories. Stories that are funny. Stories that are scary. Stories that are thoughtful. Stories of our life. We will gossip and philosophize. In these stories we share ourselves and our views. In these stories we find community and meaning. These narratives help us know how we should feel, react, and respond. They are the lens through which we interpret the world and ourselves.
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The circumstances of our life are mute. They do not tell us anything. We have a flat tire, lose a job, have a loved one die, or suffer great abuse from one we loved. These events do not tell us anything but we give meaning to these event by the stories we tell about them.
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For example, there was a man who was a minister who was being put into the gas chambers in WWII and just before he went in, he turned and said; "There is no God". This became his story about the gas chambers. Another man who ran an orphanage in the Warsaw Gettho had to deal with the horrible day when the Nazis came to take his orphaned Jewish children to the gas chambers. The Nazis said he could go. But he said no. He said "I must go with my children so that the will see that God does not abandon them". For this man the gas chambers was an opportunity to demonstrate the faithfulness of God even in times of great evil caused by evil men. They were the same gas chambers. They were mute. They did not tell a story. But different men told different stories and intrepreted them differently based on the narratives that really ruled their hearts.
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How can we figure out what our story is? We must listen to our undisciplined "self talk". That constant inner world of words that we speak to ourselves daily. That is our narration on our lives and on the world.
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Some of us will have formal, cultural, or religious stories that we may outwardly say our the story of our lives because it is expected of us to hold so particular group of values, but in reality in our inner core there is an entirely different story. This story we tell ourselves day by day and it is this story that rules our lives, our words, our actions, and our attitudes.
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We can also catch our story when we tell it in an unguarded way. Around that camp fire we tell our story. In an intimate conversation with a friend we express our tale. In the safe environment of a counselors office we spill our guts. Then we begin to tell about the events of our life interpreted by the script we have chosen and written to make sense of our life. Sometimes it is only when we tell our story that we know of what our story really consist.
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Out of our stories comes feelings of depression, hope, anxiety, confidence, anger or inner peace. These emotional states are not created by the mute events and circumstances of our life. They are created by the words we choose to interpret them and give them meaning.
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For Christian we should interpret the world through the light of the radical intervention of the creator God in the Jesus the Messiah. We should see in his incarnation, death, burial, and resurrection a foundation for hope in God's restoration of the world and healing of suffering and evil. In light of this story we should see the moments of our personal lives connected to and reflections of this large divine drama. Such an interpretation means that there is purpose in the pain and God has not abandoned us even when we suffer. (See Who Gets to Narrate the World?: Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals by Robert E. Webber for more details on this)
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So what is your story? Do you want to change it? Only when we change our stories can we change our moods. That part of our emotional state that is not dependent on our biology come out of the stories we use to interpret our lives. The good news is we can choose a different story that leads to a better mental and emotional state. Through directed "self talk" we can reinforce this new story and see over time a significant change in how we feel and how we live.
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So what do you think? Do you need a new story?
