Day 5: What's Your Story?

My sister and I tag-teamed bedtime with my 5 year old niece last night, each of us imagining a chunk of a story, round-robin style. My sister and I are pretty creative, but my niece ran circles around us, creating a walrus named Alberforth who ate only salad. I won't bog you down with the full story of Alberforth's sad tale, except to say he exploded somewhere over South Dakota. (Neither Meg nor I saw that coming...)

This got me thinking about the stories we tell when we're older than five, when we reach that age where we're aware of our self image and start taking steps to mold it. Suddenly, every day is fraught with decisions: how much to reveal about ourselves, what light to shine on where we've been, how to "spin" where we're going (or our lack of progress in any discernible direction). For me, this sort of story telling has always led to bad things, my facade blowing up in my face like Alberforth. And yet even though I know this, it's hard not to repeat.

Before we started the 40 Days, I asked the Ryanhood guys for some "behind the music" information about their songs. One of the ones that seems really honest and brave to me is MATURE, which starts out, "Sometimes mature just means over my head and I don't really know what I'm saying..." Ryan emailed that this came to him one night as he was listing to some music, thinking about life on tour:

"Pretty soon I had a song about my desperate need to impress people," he said, "and how over time, especially on long tours, this desperation starts to change Cameron and me. We place our "worth" in the number of people who clap, and the number of CDs we sell at the end of the show. We begin to morph our personalities on stage into whatever gets the biggest reaction. "Sometimes I lie a consecutive time while I stare in the eyes of a stranger". We lose ourselves. And the problem is, at the end of show, while people may seem to really like us, it might not really be 'us' they were watching."

I've done that. I do that. It's so hard, when you think people expect something of you, to resist the urge to figure out what that is and try to become it. We all have this desperate need to impress people, and an equally desperate conviction that who we are isn't enough to get the job done. It's sad, and astonishing, and right at the heart of what Jesus can help us change.

In Luke 5, we see Him do this for a bunch of different people: a leper, a paralytic...people with legitimate public image challenges. And then Jesus comes along and changes everything. Imagine what He can do for the rest of us? Imagine what He can do for you? What would it look like for us to be ourselves--only "Jesus enhanced" (as my husband calls it)--instead of the version of "us" we cook up trying to impress everyone?