Several years ago, I wrote a review on Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
As Miller learns the elements of story and what makes a good story, he concludes that his life is a pretty lousy story. No conflict. No resolution. Nothing for the hero – Miller – to work for and accomplish.
He discusses this idea with a married friend of his. The friend had a daughter going through teenage rebellion – dating a much older man who appeared to be using her. His friend decided that the solution was to get a better story – that the daughter was seeking to escape their family’s story in search of a better, more adventurous story. And so the friend decided to raise $25,000 and build an orphanage in a mission field.
Amazingly, his wife and daughter loved the idea, they worked hard together to raise the funds and then to build the orphanage, and the daughter broke up with her loser boyfriend. She concluded that he was just using her.
I have friends who raised two teenage sons. My friends are fairly well off, and the sons had decided to inhabit a story about living well off dad’s and mom’s money. They were becoming self-indulgent, unappreciative materialists.
My friends were not. They were just very blessed in their work, work they’d delayed for years to be missionaries in the Cameroons long before their sons were born. And so the parents inhabited a very different story from their sons.
The parents took an entire summer off, took the boys with them, and flew to the Cameroons to conduct a family medical mission. The dad did surgery. The mom was the nurse. And boys did everything else — from cleaning the surgical equipment, to prescreening the patients, to assisting in surgery, to cleaning out bedpans.
The Cameroons is one of the poorest, most destitute nations on this planet. And their boys learned a new story. They learned about poverty and disease and privilege. They learned to appreciate what their parents provided. And so they changed. Because they’d experienced a truer story.
There are other ways to tell a story, but nothing beats experiencing the story. Stories that are experienced change hearts and lives. Stories that are experienced can change the world. Ask Wilberforce.
In church, we rarely ask our members to experience anything other than a padded pew and air conditioning. Short-term missions are a step in the right direction. So are site visits of long-term missionaries by church leaders. So are visits to other churches to experience what they are doing. So are the lectureships.
Then again, so are tutoring sessions in the housing projects. Prayer walks in low-income neighborhoods. Celebrate Recovery meetings. Anything that gets us where we can experience the brokenness of the world we live in — where we can hear and see and feel the stories of those we wish to evangelize so that we can talk to them as a fellow sufferer.
We can’t convert those we don’t know, and we can’t know those we don’t love, and we can’t love those whose stories we’ve not heard and felt.
And we need to be prepared to tell our own stories — true stories in which God himself is the protagonist, the hero of the story, a story we tell first hand.
And in our families, we need to be sensitive to the stories we tell our children. They weren’t there when, as young people, we traveled the world and risked our lives for Jesus. They only saw the part where God prospered us as we gave birth and raised children in privilege.
