What is your life story and why you shouldn't keep it hidden

What is your life story and why you shouldn't keep it hidden?

Yesterday was a eventful day as we drove to Grand Forks to say goodbye to David and Deb after seeing the latest Hobbit movie. Part way outside Warren, Minnesota we encountered nearly white out conditions with blowing snow that occasionally became thick enough to prevent us from seeing the car ahead.  At one point I decided to put my flashers on to help the drivers behind me and those passing us in the opposite direction. By the time we made it to highway 29 we had missed the 3:15 pm show.
Conditions were getting worse with each passing mile.A decision was made to travel to the hotel Deb and David were staying in before deciding what we should do.  In this typical 75 mile per hour zone we were lucky to be going 30.

At the Howard Johnson's we made the decision to see a later movie, eat dinner before checking into individual rooms for the evening. We soon learn coming out of the theater that I-29 had been shut  down because of the storm. As I looked out at the snow swept roads in this normally busy City, my mind drifted to a conversation I had with a friend about the importance of talking about our 'life stories' following our grief. For the purpose of this blog I will define stories as those painful things from our past that leave a  impressionable  mark on us.  It can be as simple as a concussion that left you with problems with retaining information, or it can be something as painful as  having a loved one die. 

 Since my son and I are occasional SyFy fans I will use the illustration of the huge warehouse  with it's mountains upon mountains of stacked boxes with countless of information.  Our brains are like that in the sense that as each painful event is processed we tend to find a nice box to place all of those painful, icky emotions inside before placing it on our imaginary forklift  and taken to a place of storage where hopefully they will never have to be dealt with again. When painful things happen to us we tend to want to rush the healing process by bypassing the steps we must take to fully heal.

What if all of us were to learn to carry our grief forward and instead of stuffing it inside boxes we share our stories with those around us?  The greatest revelation I made upon entering our grief journey has been discovering that there are many, many people around us who are finding boxes to stuff their own painful, icky events inside.  I remembering hearing in one sermon the preacher telling us that the church is a hospital for the sick and wounded. It is not a place for perfect people because there are no perfect people, only people pretending to be perfect. The quicker we discover this fact the faster we will find healing.

God gave us the example of his son, Jesus, who was by no means afraid of revealing his emotions. You can discover this reality as you read the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  His example should be evidence for us to allow ourselves to be vulnerable with those around us and to share our life story.  As we unwrap our boxes with it's tangled emotions and as we share those hurts with those we can trust we will discover a beautiful thing: the body of Christ coming together for a refreshing time of genuine Christian fellowship.

God wants us to be emotionally and physically healthy and he wants healing to come to all of us.  Now that is a most beautiful thing!