A story exchange

A scene often repeated in my mind is a conversation between child-Rachel and grown-up-Rachel. They sit across from each other at outside a fast food restaurant holding dripping ice cream cones while child-Rachel wonders, "What changed?"
Grown-up-Rachel realizes where this is going, but takes the bait: "What do you mean?"
"I just thought I would grow up to be more, you know... cool."
The dialogue goes on as the grown-up me reasons that things just are not as "simple" as they seem in childhood. College costs money. Traveling costs money. Becoming a better author, learning photography, musical instruments, and going on adrenaline-rush excursions to sky-dive and surfing all cost... money. They all cost time, too -- something that hit me as I crossed my twentieth birthday. Life also has surprises. Child-Rachel still does not know that her Nana is about to die from cancer and it will change her world forever. She does not know that while she will always have a soft-spot for the stage, writing is where she will feel most safe, most free, and even most vulnerable. Finally grown-up-Rachel offers, "Challenges and the unknown are coming. The plan will change, but it will become a story. And you, I promise, will not only get through it, but begin to grow into someone that you trust more than your ideals. Our story doesn't stop growing."

If all the world's a stage, then every day I am living my scenes. Great amounts of these have gone by with the mundane and necessary pushing them along. But there is a desire, a deep one, that is growing. There are dreams yet to be realized, people yet to be touched, and a great story in the making. One of the most sacred hopes I have held is the desire to go to attend either Oxford or Cambridge. Originally it was Oxford all the way... but I have found that the decision is not so easy nor is the task itself, so I shall chase my opportunities. The original plan took a detour from its crisp neatness when I opted for a year of ministry school before beginning college. It went even further off-track from "Rachel's Plan A" when I met the most wonderful man in the world while at school and spent the next year, dating, engaged, and getting married. Plan A was discarded and something more tangible, more real, more worthwhile, and requiring more reconciliation with child-Rachel developed. My husband and I are both pursuing double-majors and we just made a move from Texas to the west coast to live in the town and state in which we met and have missed. Community college is the stepping stone we are on now, which will lead to university, which will hopefully aid us in careers along our story-paths. There are travels to be had, books to be written, and eventually living abroad (hopefully where I will pursue my university aspirations) as a counseling team, writing, loving, teaching, and healing.

One of the reasons I very much want to attend the Living a Better Story conference is that I seek refreshment of every day story, every day choices, and every day scenes that go on as sub-plots to our lives. My heart needs inspiration to keep moving, to not see the grand goals of studying abroad, writing books that touch lives, and raising a family that has their own hopes and dreams as intangible possibilities, but inevitable results of choices well made and a life richly lived. Much of what stands in the way of these ideas is finances: money to go to school, money to live, money to travel, money to move. But Father God is the author and perfecter of our faith... and if he perfects something so simultaneously complex and simple, so meaningful as our faith, I know Father will produce this life He leads and make it a story worth sharing.

This post was inspired by a contest to win a trip to Don Miller's Living A Better Story seminar (link) in Portland. He is an author that has inspired some life-changing questions and conversations with my Producer and "A Million Miles in a Thousand Years" embodied sentiments I have been struggling to express. I have made more decisions than I can count in pursuit of my great story and some of them have been wrong in more ways than one. In the interest, though, of pursuing a story all the same and learning along the way what it is to live a meaningful adventure with the time I have on earth, I would very much like to attend the seminar as a point of inspiration and refreshment.

If you would like to find out more about this conference, check out the following video:

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

I, Author

Every person has a story. To some extent, we are the director, the writer, and the actors to our lives. Our choices indicate what scenes will arrive and in what order. We script our own dialogue and often coach it out of others. The private moments, the deep meaningful ones, are completely at our dispense. As we live it out, we follow Shakespeare's "As You Like It":

All the world's a stage,
and all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
and one man in his time plays many parts.

Like an author about her characters, I have to wonder about myself: Where am I going? What am I doing? Who is a part of it? And so very intrinsically: Why? These are the questions I have been pondering in my heart as long as I can remember. Even as a child I knew that I wanted my life to be an adventure. Children are meant to be dreamers. There is an imagination level they have and because it tends to be curbed by time and experience, adults forget how to understand and value this gift. Childhood is the beginning, as every story must have. It is the the sweeping concepts, grand ideas, high hopes, and imagined impossibilities of the story of our life. Maturity constructs a storyboard from this and accepts that a story cannot be all highs in order to have depth. Maturity embraces adversity, frustration, growth, mistakes, and tragedy not as the end, but as the means for enriching character.

Living the adventure meant something a little different, although not wholly irrelevant, as a child. Unlimited by trivial details like finances and fears, I expected to have traveled half of the globe by this age of twenty, as well as conquering many skills such as writing, surfing, photography, bungee jumping, painting, skydiving, singing, scuba diving, sailing, para-sailing, guitar playing, piano playing, and playing with dolphins. Somewhere in that not-too-busy life, I was supposed to have already earned my bachelor's degree and be gliding my way toward a master's and doctorate in English, emphasis in creative writing, maybe double major in British literature. No sweat.

While I am still ambitious to accomplish many of these dreams (albeit somewhat modified and in a more reasonably time and manner), there are more pieces to this story than I had anticipated.

You might notice that I did not mention the producer in my introduction of roles. That is because it is arguably the most crucial role in all of this and I have chosen to relinquish that to the one who has my deepest affections. He has more experience and wisdom in managing life than I could ever hope and he has proven himself time and again as someone capable of handling my heart in a thoughtful way. Now and again we delegate roles in our story to others, allowing them to call the shots, either out of deference, humility, or fear. Eventually, we have to take those back on at some point, but with this one I do not intend to do so. It is my deepest desire (one so deep that I am often terribly afraid of it) to write, direct, and act out my life story in such a way, that it has substance enough to be produced. The one who loves and knows me better than I know myself gets the final word on my decisions and I want him to be happy with the final cut... that is exactly why I go to him in high hopes or tears: "So does this girl move to California or stay with her family in Texas? Where is the story going?"