Living a Better Story
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

A week ago, to the day, I finished reading a book called Blue Like Jazz by Portland author Donald Miller. I'm hardly the first, I am positive, to say that the book was amazing, nor will I be the last, I'm sure. Still, my experience was uniquely my own, and I cannot remember when I last found myself relating so much to an author. In truth, I can't remember that I ever have. I do know for certain that I've not laughed and cried my way like that through any book since I laughed and cried my way through Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott, which I read almost in its entirety on my long flight home from Rome a number of years ago. I don't mention Rome to gloat; I mention it because it was one very big "scene" for me, a notable moment, in my life's story. I know I'm not the first to draw comparison between Mr. Miller and Ms. Lamott, either. So, thus far I'm batting zero for zero in trying not to sound like a cliche.

After Blue Like Jazz, which I finished in about four days, I started another book Miller wrote called Searching for God Knows What. That was last Friday night and Saturday morning. I read late into the evening on Friday and started again as soon as I awoke on Saturday morning. I was actually switching back and forth that day between Searching... and a book I had checked out from the library, one woman's account of her amazing life as a photojournalist and her recovery from a devastating accident that nearly killed her while she was traveling by crowded bus on winding narrow roads in Laos in Southeast Asia.*

Sometime Saturday afternoon, I paused from my veritable reading orgy to capture in writing some thoughts I was having about writing as I read the reflections of these two inspiring authors. I also paused for a Facebook break, and out of curiosity looked to see whether Donald Miller has a Facebook page - which of course he does, as does everyone who is anyone these days, I suppose. It was on his Facebook page that I learned he's hosting a contest with the potential to win tickets for two to a seminar he is presenting in Portland next month.

Usually I seem to find out about such things two to three days after it's already too late, but this time I actually had several days left before the deadline. Tonight at Midnight is now the deadline, in fact! Yikes. I have three hours to write my entry. The challenge is to write about what kind of story I want to live and how I think attending the seminar might help. Ordinarily I would prefer to have more time to write something like this. Well, I suppose technically I have had all week, but I wanted first to read Mr. Miller's latest book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, because I understand that the seminar will be based on ideas he writes about in that book.

I was fortunate to be able to get A Million Miles... on CD from the library (the printed copies have a wait time of like twenty-two years or something! and I'm trying to curb my book buying lately... and I had already bought Blue Like Jazz and Searching for God Knows What in the same week at my beloved Half-Price Books. Sorry Mr. Miller, I have no idea what that does to your royalties, but I think you know something of what it's like to be "self-employed," as I am...). I had the even more unusual fortune to have a freelance job four days this week, more than an hour's drive north of my home, way up toward the Canadian border. So I was able to listen to A Million Miles... (twice, even) in my car as I drove.

So now here I am, last minute, trying to tell how and why I want to live a better story. And earlier in the week I took some time to scope out a little of the "competition" for this contest, and it is stiff! I know there are a few entrants that personally I would vote for before I'd vote even for my own story. I'd post links here just now but I do, after all, only have three hours left and the clock is ticking. :) (Actually I did try to post links to two of my favorites of the several I read, but I can't find the bookmark that I thought I saved for one of the two! I'll try to come back and post those later if I can find the one I somehow lost.)

I feel like I've been trying to live a good story for over thirty years. Pretty much my whole life, really. I didn't call it that, of course. And I've been far from successful a rather large discouraging percent of the time. But intuitively I've understood the concept, even if I didn't have a name for it, for a long time, most of my life somehow. It's like it's in my blood or something. Or maybe it's just my Myers Briggs personality type, INFJ. I've seen claims that Ghandi, Princess Diana, and Mother Theresa were INFJ, for whatever or nothing that that is worth. High and mighty, eh? It's all just trying to figure ourselves out, after all. Right? Some sort of cosmic "pin the tail on the donkey" or something. Donkey. Hah, that's kind of funny. :)

I was a sensitive child (and am still a sensitive adult), emotionally and spiritually, and I have a memory of being about four years old, lying in bed crying into a stuffed dog my Great Grandmother had given me, asking Jesus to please let me come home to Heaven to be with Him. That's rather heavy stuff for a four-year-old. When I was seven or eight, I remember walking home alone from the school bus stop and having an intense conversation with myself in my head about how the Catholics believed they were right, the Jews were very devout and believed they were right, the Muslims were so committed (I'd heard) (they were much "farther away" to our reality back then than 'they' are now) that some of them were even willing to die for their beliefs (which seemed more than I felt up to committing myself to at that tender age), and the Assemblies of God people (which was what I was at the time) believed we were right, and I just knew we couldn't all be right (because my pastor and my Sunday School teachers had made that pretty clear), so I remember coming to the unsettled decision that all a person could do was to pick one and sort of "go with it" and hope it was the right one. I remember having big confusing questions about God as a result of that thought process, but I didn't have the vocabulary back then to articulate it. Nor did I have anyone with whom to discuss such things.

I went on to to be raised in some crazy crazy stuff and to struggle with my faith for at least another twenty years. I wrote about it all in a post I attempted earlier today that was way over the 1,000 words suggested for the Living a Better Story contest. I may still post that blog entry anyway, just in case anyone is curious. Suffice it to say my life included private Christian school for three years, after my father left and my parents divorced, where we marched in formation into Chapel every morning (I can remember being asked to lead a few times and calling out "Left! Right! Left! Right! as we were expected to do, and if we weren't synchronized we were forced to exit the Chapel and march in again so I wanted to call the timing out right) and regularly were laid hands upon and encouraged to pray to receive "the gift of the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues." (If anyone is wondering, I did eventually succumb to the pressure and found my tongue "loosed" and found my "heavenly prayer language." For a while, anyway. I hope I don't offend anyone who is still moved by their prayer language. That's definitely not my intent... but neither is having a "prayer language" anymore, at least not one that isn't me directly and inteligbly expressing myself to God.)

Those years also included my mother and stepfather traveling to Texas for a weekend to become "ordained" ministers through some mail-order program I never figured out. After they returned home, they bought themselves new Bibles with their names inscribed on the front cover as "Reverend" Mr. and Mrs. In later years they were directly center to two church splits, they moved us to Oklahoma to attend Bible school but then decided the instructors were teaching false doctrine, they held regular prayer meetings in our home in which they prayed to cast out demonic spirits... oh, and then I left home when I was seventeen and a half to get away from the crazyness. I could tell you so much more but, 1,000 words here and I'm sure I'm still exceeding that by a margin farther than the ruler of 'grace' might extend (though I never did learn what those exact measurements were.)

I landed in Florida with a friend and got involved in a Charismatic Evangelical church there. I attended services usually three times a week, plus the Saturday evening prayer service. I served in the nursery and taught Sunday School, I attended College and Career events, I joined the Drama Team and presented skits before the church and on the beach to share the Gospel with the Unsaved. (I love how capitalizing something makes it look official or definite or something.) As part of the Drama Team I went on a two-week missionary trip to Guatemala and when I returned, enrolled for a year in the School of Biblical Studies through the church's accredited Bible Training School. When I completed that year of intensive study, I went back to Guatemala for a summer and worked with Youth with a Mission (YWAM, pronounced "Why-Wham" which I find oddly telling somehow) in Guatemala City.

I wanted to be a missionary and thought God had a specific "call' for my life. I tried and tried to hear what the "call" was, what remote country I should go to or what I should do next after I returned home from Guatemala, but I apparently had cotton in my ears or something.

It's a long story for another time (some of it is in that other draft of a post I wrote earlier today), but I grew very disallusioned as the voices and ideas in my head clamored to be acknowledged. The voices from all the way back to when I was seven or eight years old or earlier. I believed I was supposed to be part of the 10/40 window of sharing the Gospel to every nation, tribe, and people group... and yet something in me balked at the idea of imposing Western culture and Western ideals on other people groups.

I had grown up in a decidedly intensely "End Times" focused denomination - and, especially, in an intensely End Times focused household, with my mother and stepfather at the helm. My father had left when I was nine, in part (he later explained) because he was worried about somehow "messing up" my younger sister and I, and in part because he didn't know what to do with my mother's religious fanaticism. I grew up literally believing that I would not live to see my thirtieth birthday because I believed Armageddon or the Rapture or both would occur before then. You really do live your life differently when you think it's going to be very short. And, unfortunately, moreso when you've been very indoctrinated.

So I entered my "adult" life on my own at seventeen and a half with my head and spirit full of indoctrination but with my intellect and a whole other part of my spirit being at war, somehow, with the whole of me. I wanted to do good in the world (I was, and still am, highly compassionate and moved by and connected to the world around me) but yet I was so confused and confounded by the "religion" in my life.

A whole bunch of stuff happened in my early twenties - my mother's second divorce and third marriage, my attempting to confront some abuse my sister and I suffered at the hands of our stepfather (and then my mother's subsequent response of "Just give it to Jesus, He'll take care of it"), my culture shock at my return to the U.S. after a youthful summer in Guatemala, the eventual difficult breakup of my first young true love relationship, my experience of a total lack of support from my supposed church "community."

I found that there was no room for me, my questions, or my pain in my church home. I eventually stopped attending, and grew pretty disallusioned with the idea of "church" in general.

Eventually I moved to the Pacific Northwest, to Washington state, to be near my sister and my two sweet nieces. I restarted my life here, remade myself in my "career" (went from graphic design to technical editing and worked as a contractor for Microsoft). And I continued here to try to search out and make my "story" for my life.

I soon stumbled on a Christian organization that was serving homeless teens on the streets of Downtown Seattle and the University District. I signed up for the intensive training and found myself amongst a new breed of Christians I'd never before known existed. They were ecumenical, and for that reason or some other, were willing to be "real" people. I was most shocked by and attracted to the fact that they were okay using an occasional swear word during training, most often when they were "role playing" as though they were one of the youth I would encounter in the dropin center, but also at other times. They seemed - and were - real people. I remember months later saying to another fellow volunteer that I'd "found my pod" (whatever the heck I meant by that! :) when I stumbled upon New Horizons Ministries at that time.

I served there for six years, mostly seeming to gravitate to the youth who were addicted to heroin and to the young women who became pregnant. I was blessed, personally, to assist with the birth of two babies, but then sadly also had to walk through the journey with the young women as their children were removed from their care by CPS because the girls couldn't rise to the challenge of caring for those babies. I would write that the boys, the fathers, couldn't rise to the challenge either but the sad fact is that too often the girls weren't even quite sure who the "baby daddy" was.

Somewhere in this time, I found myself part of a small church on Capitol Hill where I finally felt "safe." The pastor was a wonderful, truly unique man, who I suspect had experienced a great deal of "brokenness" in his own life. He was extremely humble and sensitive to the hurts and sorrows of humanity. I attended there for two years or more and hardly had a service where I wasn't deeply moved (I cried a lot there). I regularly shared my hymnal with a man who was mentally ill; another man in his 50s who was mentally handicapped loved to talk to me about Lawrence Welk; a gay couple regularly graced the front row, one man in leather chaps and the other, a near dead-ringer for Charles Manson, in a skirt; the pastor regularly incorporated the children into the service and into his visual object lessons; sometimes he would ask me to interpret the songs or his message or Scripture reading into American Sign Language, which at that time I had gathered the courage to send myself back to school to pursue a degree in.

It was John Eldredge's book "Journey of Desire," which I'd read twice, that finally gave me the impetus to figure out how to send myself back to school. American Sign Language had been a passion since I was about nine years old, and becoming an Interpreter had long been a dream. So I did three years of school (I'd already done a year of related classes back in Florida before I dropped that to attend Bible School), and I graduated with a degree in Sign Language Interpreting and started my work.

I thought I would finally feel something amazing, having achieved such a life-long dream, fulfilling such a call or rounding out such a "scene" in my life, or whatever, but mostly what I felt was a sense that I'd finally made it to the other side of the rainbow and found out that there was no actual pot of gold over there. Yikes. So I scratched my head and shuffled my feet for a while and I tried to figure out the next part of the story. I worked to gain experience and skill, and in 2008 I took the national certification exam and passed it, so that I did actually achieve a long-held dream of becoming a Certified Sign Language Interpreter.

And yet ... I realize now it was just one more scene in life. Eventually someone yells "That's a wrap!" and the whole party breaks up, everyone goes their separate ways... and you find yourself waiting pedestrian-like at the bus stop of life, wondering where you're going next.

Shortly after I had graduated from school, I had "met someone" and found myself in a serious relationship, the first one really since my early twenties. And so I thought that my "next big scene" was to star as (or at least to work hard at and learn how to become) stepmom to his two young newly-teen daughters. All I can say now is, "Give me Shakespeare, it would be easier." :p But I threw myself into the role, as I have always done.

But ... I did every costume change asked of me, I memorized every line and gave my best delivery, I took stage direction as well as anyone could, I sought out coaches to help me with the role. And, after four years, after much ongoing professional therapy and much journaling and much reading and much seeking of support and much intentional personal growth (for well more than just those four years), I was finally able to admit... He was not good to me. He never was, not from the start or all the way to the finish. It was a very very sad (and unnecessary) thing. But, for a time, I was like the women Donald Miller mentions briefly in his book A Million Miles... I was afraid to give up the story that I had, I was afraid to choose a better story.

Whether it was the writer of my life finally taking control of the keyboard, or me the character finally acquiescing, I finally made the difficult decision to end that relationship, last year. Some further bad stuff happened, he treated me even worse through the breakup than he had during the "love" part, and I was left pretty devastated. I mean, I had tried to make us a "family," to make him and his kids my family, and I had to give that up and I was left pretty adrift for a long while after that. I had thought the story of my life was going a particular direction, that this whole long section of filming was providing a foundation upon which the future of the story would be based. And then suddenly I found the whole long thing nothing but waste on the cutting room floor. And believe me, that's far more brutal than just deleting some keystrokes while you're writing the screenplay beforehand. When you actually choose the actors, build the props, go on location, memorize all your lines, do a dozen takes to get each scene painstakingly just right or at least almost just right... only to chuck the whole thing... it's expensive in ways that are hard to measure.

But I had once again in my life made the choice to seek out a better story.

So after a time of grieving, I began the recovery process, and began to rebuild my life. I wouldn't say I was necessarily living any great or memorable scenes, though I did do things like take sailing lessons and start to make some new friends (the relationship had kept me pretty isolated, which was one red-flag aspect right there and which ran counter to my ongoing hunger for community). I've been willing to rest in the calm for a while, to carefully tend the wounds, to learn from the missteps. In the post-mortem time after that particular train-wreck I've cemented in my mind (I hope) how much more actions truly do speak than do floofy words of "I love you" someone throws your direction. I've realized that someone can be a nice companion but that doesn't mean they're necessarily being a good partner or even, particularly, a friend. I've learned that if I give up a little of what's important, I might be giving up more than I know. I've learned my own vibrancy in relationship and that I want to be with someone who embraces that vibrancy and doesn't then want to keep it under a bell jar. I've learned that one person cannot fill up another person (no matter how hard I might try to do the filling). I've learned the value in differentiation, in being able to be an individual, one of two individuals, hopefully, and that relationship should support that, should support the two becoming their best selves (to sound all Oprah-ish) and not diminish either by trying to become one single throbbing mind.

With these lessons and more carefully tucked away, I've been trying to move forward in writing the screenplay of my life, but I've been lacking inspiration, lacking vision for what scenes might be ahead. Doing all this gluttony of Don Miller reading the past week and a half has helped. (Did I mention that I also read Father Fiction this week? So that's three and a half Miller books read or listened to (twice) in about ten days time or something. Like I said, gluttony.) Plus I read the book about the photojournalist and her recovery (emotional and spiritual) from her brush with death. I wish that I could capture the "first blush" feeling that I had with the first reading of each of those books. If I could capture that and ride on that emotional high of intellectual and spiritual and emotional stimulation, of awakening awareness and inspiration, that feeling of relating so well to another person and feeling known somehow, even though these authors don't know me, well that would be a nice way to live.

But what I have to do is parse out the message. From both authors I get that it takes something like enthalpy. What do I do to raise the heat temperature in my own self to create the energy to move forward. I've had, I believe, my "inciting incident" that Miller writes about; the end of the relationship seems like it was certainly that. But I'm still warming up, slow like an oven. I guess maybe that's why I'm hoping to go to Mr. Miller's seminar. I'd like the inspiration time to continue for a little longer, to find my footing a little better. Some of the other contest entrants have amazing vision; they already have written the next big scene for their lives, they just need the funding or the right partner to come along to help with the work or to put the scene through a last touch-up revision or two. I'm still sitting here looking at a mostly blank page, wondering how to get started constructing scenes again.

I've spent years doing what Seattle author Carlene Cross calls "Fleeing Fundamentalism" (that's the title of her book, which is my latest read that I've just started). I've had to do so much deconstruction of the "faith" and religion I was brought up in. It's been a grueling process that continues even now and it's been a frightening one, too, because I've often wondered whether, at the end of it, I would be left with any faith at all. That's why I like authors like Miller and Anne Lamott, because they touch something in me that reminds me that a real faith does exist somewhere deep and intimate and (hopefully) untouchable inside of me.

But I've learned that God isn't going to speak in a booming voice out of the clouds, "Thou Shalt Go to India" or "Thou Shalt Go Back to School Again" or "Thou Shalt Get Up Off the Couch and Call Your Friend Susan to Inquire About Her Writing Group."

So, steps I can take on my own are... I've committed to start trying to write more. And maybe I could even look into taking a writing class. And I need to quit just thinking about finding somewhere new to volunteer, I need to actually do it. Working with victims of domestic abuse might be a good area for me, since I now understand with personal experience the how and why involved in women going back to that. There's my new dog that I could train for pet-assisted therapy. I could look into going back to school; I keep thinking maybe I'd like to. I also could do more to move from technical editing into editing other forms of writing that interest me more, especially since I've realized that it's hard to earn a living with only the interpreting gigs. That photojournalism thing... I've always said it's secretly my secret dream job. I'm sure there's more.

I hope there's more. I want to do more in and with and for the world than just going on a hike now and then or occasionally sailing on tiny Lake Union or something. I long for community, for a vision and to be doing something for others, for a partner to share it all with, to be "living up to my potential" and not just sitting around waiting to die. When I die, I want people to feel that I died "too soon." I want to take off my own damn bell jar now and experience my own vibrancy again. I just need a bit more inspiration and a bit more enthalpy, or whatever. I know this might not be "winning entry" material, but it's what I have to work with right now. I'm starting over at this point in my life, along the lines of my blog title, "Second Half Beginnings," since all the previous scenes of my story have concluded. If the metaphor were theatre instead of a movie, I'd be in the pause between acts right now, waiting for the curtain to rise again. And there's value even in that moment, giving the audience a chance to relax and breathe. But my anticipation is growing for that curtain to rise to usher in the next act, the next scene, the next cast of characters in my story.

**********

Here is information about Donald Miller and the seminar he's hosting in September in Portland, as well as about this writing contest which it is now too late for you to enter, sorry, but I got mine in just in the nick of time I hope (Pacific Coast time! :), though the computer decided not to cooperate with me near the end.

www.donmilleris.com/conference


Living a Better Story Seminar from All Things Converge Podcast on Vimeo.

*Learning to Breathe: One Woman's Journey of Spirit and Survival, by Alison Wright