Life is a Series…Not a Story

I had someone ask me a few years back to tell them my story. My response was… Which one???

I mean, who has just one story?

I get what they were asking. They wanted a “testimony” of my life. But my entire life is my testimony, and so is yours. Each story holds within it a nugget of treasure, even the painful ones. We have one story after another after another.

Our lives are more than a story. They are a series of stories.

What that request did was spur me to search out and remember my stories, and I hope this will stir up the same desire in you. It became an exciting adventure of high points and low ones that made overcoming stories, thriving stories, failure stories, and growth stories. It was a quest of remembering things I had long forgotten, getting new life lessons out of old experiences, and seeing a golden thread throughout each of the stories. That thread for me is called redemption.

When we redeem something, we buy it back or recover it. I saw that recurring theme throughout every story I relived. Something was lost or stolen, whether relationships or inheritance or treasured possessions. And even though sometimes it took many years, there was always a recovery that exceeded the loss.

Perhaps that’s what the person was looking for when they asked for my story. A theme. That golden thread that ran throughout my life.

I discovered it. My life theme is redemption.

But every story has a lesson, too, and I don’t want to lose sight of those lessons. Kind of like the World Series. I am not even a big sports fan, so it’s funny that example came to mind. But the World Series are held yearly and consist of the championship games for Major League Baseball. Everybody that cares about baseball at all usually remembers who won the World Series. But unless you are a real baseball fan who gets into knowing about the different teams, players, coaches, and stats, you are likely to not remember the specifics of each game played in the Series. Yet it’s the lessons learned in the events of those games that help the players play better in their next game.

Big picture is easier to remember. Like the theme running through our lives. It is important. But those individual games are what allowed there to be a champion in the series, just like our individual stories allow there to be a theme in our lives. The lessons learned in each game, each story, is what helps us play better the next time around. It carries us, and others, through similar trials with greater wisdom.

Your life is a series of stories that have lessons of their own. And it also has a golden thread.
I hope you will be the biggest fan of your own life and remember the specific stories and their lessons, as well as the theme they created.

Game on!

Brenda is a believer in impossible possibilities. In brokenness becoming beautiful. In justice and mercy and honor and power – with love perfecting them all. She is a wife, mom, mimi, daughter, and friend who also enjoys speaking, writing, and coaching.