the stories we write

At church this morning we talked with a friend of ours who just had emergency surgery where it was discovered she had two cancerous tumors. It had been a scary few weeks, a hard recovery but every time I have seen her or heard word of how she's doing she has had the most incredible outlook. Today she said, "there was so much God wanted to show me through all of this. I learned and grew and saw so much..."

She continued and told us lots more, and while she talked I was so struck by how she was choosing to retell her own story. She was completely sincere, completely hopeful and completely grateful as she talked about her scary month.

I love blogging for this very reason. Blogging is a very intentional way that I literally write my own story. And I'm so aware of it. Last week I could have written a end-of-the-week post and I could have written it ten different ways, all of them true. I hold so much power in my hands when I (literally) write my own story. We all hold this power.

So I could have written about how our barn has been one week delayed because the wrong length floor boards were ordered. And elaborated on any number of opinions surrounding that delay. Or I could have written about how because the wrong boards were delivered, the builder discovered they were not what we needed anyway, and that in reordering we saved thousands of dollars on different boards. I could have written about the mud pit that our barn is sitting in because of all the rain, or I could write about how incredible the grass seed in our field has taken... because of all the rain.

Do you see what I am saying? We each hold this pen in our hands. God has literally given us the ability to write our own stories, pick our themes, pick our mood, pick our response and reaction, choose our words, and as a result, literally choose our life.

I am naturally a positive person. And I've always been a storyteller so that even in awful circumstances I am already writing the comedy-version of this tale in my mind. I get that not everyone is like this. But today at church, hearing our friend tell of a really hard season with not a hint of victim-hood, I saw this truth clear as day. She possessed all the good fruits: hope, gratitude, joy and thankfulness, even in the midst of her storm. I thought to myself, 'no matter what, no matter what, I want to write my story like that.'