Joining a Story  

While joining a story already in progress is one of the scariest things that I’ve had to do in college so far, I believe it is also one of the most necessary and rewarding. Let me explain what I mean.

As Donald Miller has made perfectly clear in A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, everyone lives a story. Whether it is good or bad depends entirely upon him or her, but there is no escaping it; every human being on earth lives a story.

Sometimes the hardest part is choosing to make our stories interconnect. We get perfectly comfortable living our story, unconnected from people outside our bubble of familiarity.  Reaching out and joining someone else’s story is just plain hard. It’s not comfortable and most of the time it’s terribly awkward. But, it is so worth the effort.

Imagine what life would be like if you had never reached out. To anyone. Never risked rejection or pain.

What would your story be like then? Thinking about this brings to mind the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. We rarely realize what an impact our lives have made until we stop and imagine how the lives of the people around us would be different if we had never been born. Sometimes we never fully realize how God has used our story.

The stretching and sometimes painful process of joining the stories already in progress around us adds to our own story. It adds depth, and beauty, purpose, and eventually, pleasure. The risk of joining an unfamiliar group of people is inherently rewarding, although it may take time for those rewards to become evident. Through reaching out, you meet new people, contribute to their unique story and in return, your own story is enriched by their presence. So take the time to risk, to reach, to live a good story