I've been hearing and reading a lot lately about story. We all love a great story, and the best ones do more than just entertain us for a night, they transform us.
I've always thought that a good story would be to end up somewhere special, to have a spectacular destination and closure, but I've discovered truth in what Yvoun Chouinard has told me, "You learn that what's important is how you got there, not what you've accomplished."
If you heard a story about a climber who reached the top of a mountain, but never heard about his hurt and joy along the way, you would be pretty bored. In a good story, we want to sweat with the character, feel the rock the he feels beneath our feet, experience the cold and windy nights, breathe the fresh mountain air, be troubled by his loneliness, altogether, we want to be part of the story with him, and when he reaches the summit the hair on our arms rises too, but it's only in knowing how he got there that makes the story so appealing, so real, and so meaningful for us.
We love great stories, from a distance.
We all have these stories, but for us, we want to hide the "how we got there" and just proclaim that we've arrived, because how we got there doesn't always seem beautiful. We couldn't bear to show others that we wore some blisters along the way, that we got lost at mile 14, or that we had to use a map and we couldn't do it all on our own.
The same stories that we love to hear, we hate to be.
I don't think that the story of life, your story, is about where you end up, it's about you're transformation. How you, as the main character in your story, have evolved is far more imperative than where you end up. Don't be too concerned with where you are going, but enjoy how you are arriving, because after all, "the journey is half of the fun."
In Christ we are, "...being transformed by renewal of the mind."
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