That's My Story

A line heard often during the three years I spent in West Texas went like this, “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” Our stories are important. And in saying that, I mean the basic stories from which we live. Sometimes we need to take stock, to remember. Sometimes we need to stop and assess what is the basis for who we are and what we intend for our lives to be.

Again from Frederick Buechner, this time from his book A Room Called Remember:

“The story of Christ is where we all started from, though we've come so far since then that there are times when you'd hardly know it to listen to us and when we hardly know it ourselves. The story of Christ is what once, somehow and somewhere, we came to Christ through. Maybe it happened little by?little—a?face coming slowly into focus that we'd been looking at for a long time without really seeing it, a voice gradually making itself heard among many other voices and in such a way that we couldn't help listening after a while, couldn't help trying somehow, in some unsatisfactory way, to answer. Or maybe there was more drama to it than?that—a?sudden catch of the breath at the sound of his name on somebody's lips at a moment we weren't expecting it, a sudden welling up of tears out of a place where we didn't think any tears were. Each of us has a tale to tell if we would only tell it. But however it happened, it comes to seem a long time ago and a long way away, and so many things have happened?since—so?many books read, so many sermons heard or preached, so much life?lived—that?to be reminded at this stage of the game of the story of Jesus, where we all started, is like being suddenly called by your childhood name when you have all but forgotten your childhood name and maybe your childhood too.”?

At some point in school I had to memorize the poem “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe. I still recall some of it, especially the first line, “Ah distinctly I remember.”

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It seems that too often even if we do remember our basic story, that memory is not all that distinct. You sense at times that we must have forgotten, and even if we have not forgotten, we have rationalized to death what little we remember. We spend a lot of our time with words like “Well, he couldn’t really mean that,” or “That just won’t work in the real world.” But however we got where we are, Buechner’s words call us to at least pause to reflect.

I know that the Christ story is not everybody’s story, but for many of us it is our story, and we need to stick to it. It is something that we need to remember with all its implications, and the more distinctly the better.