Living a Good Story

It was Easter weekend…my husband and I found ourselves sitting in front of the TV eating See’s Candies straight out of  a USPS shipping box that the in-laws sent us a week ago. For some reason, keeping it in the box made us feel less guilty about eating it…I don’t know why. Nontheless, the supply in the candy box kept dwindling and that one show of “The Office” we were going to watch turned into a full season. 

We decided we needed to expel some of the energy resulting from our chocolate sugar high on a walk around our neighborhood. While walking, the guilt from wasting a perfectly good Saturday in front of the TV set in. We started talking about adjustments we could make that would allow us to lead a more fulfilling and adventurous life.

I brought up a book I was currently reading by Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, that talked about making your life into a good story. According to Donald Miller, to make your life a good story you need to have adventure.

Some people would say being in the military is a great adventure. While I would agree with them, it is easy to get tied up in the frustrations of everyday military life. The adventure of moving to a new place across the country gets bogged down with PCS paperwork, dealing with finance, damaged goods, finding work and a place to live, etc. So rather than adventurous, life can seem mundane and frustrating.

Donald Miller explains in his book that in order to have adventure, the main character must go through challenges. Think about some of the most interesting people you know…I am sure almost all of them have gone through and overcome some sort of significant challenge. The struggle they go through is what makes their story rich.

Donald Miller makes the following points in his book on ways to live a good story:

• The first of many keys to living a great life is to take full responsibility for our lives. You are the storyteller and the principal character all in one. You have the ability and control over your life to determine if your life story is boring or not.

• The character (aka YOU) has to want something. When we find that thing we want, our story not only engages the world, it engages us and we become much more interested in life itself.

• Every character must go through conflict. Far from being a bad thing, conflict in story is a necessity. In America we live in a culture that avoids conflict, but we do so to our own detriment. Conflict fills a story with meaning and beauty. 

• Stories must resolve. In stories there’s a scene called a climax. A climactic scene will resolve all the conflict in the story in a single action. Life doesn’t really work this way, but having a visual scene in your mind that you can head toward is motivating. For instance, if you want to lose 30 pounds, don’t set that as a goal, make the goal finishing a 5k. Finishing a 5k is visual and much more motivating.

(source: Donald Miller's blog, donmilleris.com)

By the end of our discussion, my husband and I had reached a small pier on our walk. Feeling inspired by Donald Miller’s words and the residual effects from our sugar high, we decided to be “adventurous” and jump off the pier fully-clothed. Was this silly, cliché act the embodiment of what it means to live a good story? Definitely not….but it is a small step to making a greater effort to embrace life and adventure.

While our lifestyle has not changed overnight since reading this book, we have started taking steps to ensure our lives are more fulfilling. For example, we’ve decided every couple months we are going to take a road trip to surrounding cities and states to explore other places. We now try to plan our weekends in advance so we can make sure we don’t have another Saturday like the one over Easter weekend. We even recently invested in a surfboard to entertain the locals and give them something to laugh at while they are laying out on the beach ; )

When it’s all said and done, what we are really focusing on is not running away from the challenges and frustrations of life…even boredom. Instead, we are attempting to confront them and find new, creative ways to overcome them.

Your challenge for the week, should you choose to accept it: do ONE thing this week that has been on your mind and you’ve been thinking about for some time. Try a new restaurant, visit another town, go for a hike, complete your scrapbooking project, call a friend to go to lunch, etc. These small acts can help you in your path to living a good story.

Xoxo,

Whit