Live a Great Story!

The words, “Live a great story,” beckon me from a frame on my living room wall. My former roommate wrote out this message for me on the beach last year after I had listened to Donald Miller’s new book, “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years,” about living a better story.

It seems I have always felt this indescribable feeling that there is more to life than “this” – whatever “this” may be at the time. Right now “this” is living, or should I say existing, as a single, never married, 30-something in a small town with two cats—working, eating, sleeping, watching TV, and occasionally hanging out with friends.

The “more to life”—that “abundant life” that Jesus promised—is still calling to me to do and to be something better than I am. Something more like what I was made for, and not what I have simply accepted as life.

So how do I live a better, or especially, a great story? I know one thing: It’s not continuing in the old habits of not using my gifts and opting instead to sit in front of the TV, feeding my face and thinking with the same victim mentality I have had most of my life. Instead, living a better story means I have to get up, get out, and do something DIFFERENT that makes life better, and more abundant.

It has been in the last few weeks that I have resolved to get healthy. I have always been overweight, comparing my body to that of my much taller and much thinner older sister. This mentality of having always been fat has stood like a brick wall in my path to a healthy weight. That, and the fact that I find it difficult to stick anything green into my mouth. Not to mention that exercise is like a prison sentence.

However, that brick wall is beginning to crumble as I am getting to the point that losing weight is no longer optional. For my own health (and for the sake of my too-small ankles that can’t hold up my 190-something lbs), I have stepped out and started a weight-loss program. I have also decided to actually use my YMCA membership to do water aerobics and Zumba classes.

Sure, I would love to look really good in a dress, but it’s much more than that. It’s about restoring my confidence and being healthy enough to pursue my dreams. I have used my weight as an excuse to not use the talents God has given me, such as drama, singing, and public speaking, because I couldn’t stand that everyone would be looking at me. Now I am realizing that it IS possible for ME to be a thin person and that, frankly, it doesn’t really matter what people think.

Looking back on my teen years, I remember two broad goals of mine: to help people and to make a difference in the world. In my quest for purpose, I have failed more than succeeded in those two realms. Serving others has not come easily to me. Seems I’ve been more selfish than I would like to admit. My weight and general feeling of blahness have also been influential in keeping me from participating in many selfless serving opportunities.

As I continue to heal, and concentrate less on the junk of my own life, the desire to step out and help other people gets stronger and stronger. I want to take a risk and go somewhere that is so out of my comfort zone, like a mission trip where my faith will be stretched. But I don’t want to just go on a mission trip and then come back and be like I’ve always been.

There are opportunities all around me, in my every day life, in which I can be less selfish and more giving. Like giving someone money anonymously who needs it more than I do, or helping an old woman in a clothing store get back in her wheelchair after she’d fallen out. I am realizing that living a life for self is a very lonely life indeed. It’s only when we step out and put others’ needs and desires ahead of our own, that we truly being to LIVE a great story.

Also, I have felt for years that my enduring Father has been wooing me to use my gifts for Him, but I have felt unworthy and insecure, fearing all that can be feared: failure, success, rejection, pain. One of those gifts is writing. I used to love to write when I was younger, and have attempted to write many novels in the last eight years or so. But they all sit, unfinished, in my computer.

Maybe I stopped trying because of those all too-familiar words that have run like a tape recorder through my mind for as long as I can remember: “You can’t do anything right.” Of course, I knew in my head that those words were a lie, but in my heart, they rang too true. Words from my past, and failures I’ve endured, built another wall when it came to writing. I would start, but then stop when the story got too difficult, much like I did in real life.

But that wall is beginning to crumble too as God keeps whispering his Truth and I, little by little, am beginning to accept it. I am also starting to accept my gift of writing and desire to use it to reach people, to touch their hearts. I have read so many books, Donald Miller’s included, that have reached into my very soul and touched and healed things I never knew even existed or needed to be healed. I believe God has been calling me to this most difficult task for some time, but it was that hard, narrow path I was so afraid to take.

Right now, though, is the opportune time for me to write, even if it never goes anywhere. I am single with no family responsibilities. Sure, I have fears that I will work hard and then nothing will come of it. But I refuse to focus on that. If it is God who calls me to it, then I am doing it for Him and no one else. Not to mention that I have a writer’s group who will be there to help me in my journey.

What I want to do to live a better story may not be grand. However, when I have lived most of my life not risking anything and just going with the flow of life, losing weight, serving others and writing a book IS a big deal. And after having gone through seven months of life coaching in the past year (which is like counseling, only the focus is more on the future than on the past), I am finally getting to the point that I can step out of my familiarity, my comfort zone, and go where I’ve never attempted to go before, where I never thought I could go.

And one of those places may just be Donald Miller’s “Living a Better Story” seminar in Portland, Oregon. I am entering this blog in a contest to win a trip to the seminar. Considering that Donald Miller is one of my favorite authors, and I could never afford to go this seminar on my own, winning this contest would be a dream come true. I would be honored to be able to spend time with Donald who has written five books, been all over the country speaking, and has changed his sedentary, boring life into one of adventure and meaning. I do believe that this seminar could help me get a clearer purpose for my life, and perhaps I could come away with a more lucid vision of what kind of book God is calling me to write.

For too many years I have been “desiring” to live a better story. But now I know that desiring to live a better story is not enough to actually LIVE a better story. More than anything else, I believe this seminar will be what Donald calls “an inciting incident”: the event that will force me to LIVE a better story, to go out there and DO the things God is calling me to do, and thereby become what God is calling me to be: a better character living a truly great story.

www.donmilleris.com/conference

Living a Better Story Seminar from All Things Converge Podcast on Vimeo.