If you have been a reader here long, you know my posts can go in a number of directions. I try to keep the topics in the realm of the heart, relationships, faith, and becoming more fully ourselves. Sometimes inspiration strikes from my work with people in my counseling office. Other times ideas show up while I live life at home, in the yard, at the gym, or in the bleachers. This post came from a simple prompt when I was looking for a kick in the pants toward putting words on a page.

The prompt read: What can a trauma survivor teach the church?

What followed grew out of what I believe the church can be, along with my experience walking alongside people who have endured trauma, people who know their need for safety and care and who, through the process of healing, have begun to find it.

Over the course of several weeks, what began as a few words on a screen turned into a piece longer than most of my posts. For those who like quick reads (myself included most days), you have my permission to read in spurts, returning as you desire. As I realized this would be a longer post, I also sought feedback from others about whether it belonged on Substack or would be better as a short, standalone book. I got mixed responses. It is longer than most of my Substack essays, but perhaps this is the place to share it, see how it resonates, and explore what it might become with feedback from readers.

As I consider developing these ideas into a short book down the road, I would love to hear what stands out to you. What ideas connect with you? What would you like to hear more about? What questions linger for you after reading? If this were to become a resource for churches, what else needs to be said?

Whether you have experienced harm from the church, currently work as a pastor or ministry leader, or just want to make the church a safer place, I’d love to hear thoughts you have that could develop these ideas further.

Ultimately I want whatever this becomes to help the church become a safer place for those of us who need it.

And as always, thank you for reading.

I was born into the church. My dad worked as a youth pastor, and as the story goes, he announced to the congregation long before I arrived or they knew the gender, “We’re having a boy, and his name will be Luke.” Somehow, he just knew. The gender reveal happened without any warning to my mother; Dad simply told the church.

Growing up in the church, I learned some things about what the church was supposed to be. For starters, I heard plenty about love, because God is love. We the church should be a safe harbor offering refuge for the shipwrecked and also a shipyard for vessels under construction. The church should be an extended family, a place of community. It should be a place of worship, where God is center and humanity finds its proper place in the story. It should be a city on a hill, a light in the dark, a home where truth and love find harmony. And from this harbor, messengers carrying such harmony set sail. As Paul taught, “speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.”

And so, in learning to live and speak the truth in love, the church should also become the safest place on earth.

But I would learn we are not always what we are supposed to be. The church is not always loving. Over the years, I’ve seen friends unmoored in the church’s harbors. People attending in search of family and community have left without finding either. And then there are those who find it and lose it after hard words, betrayals, and deceptions. The church can become a place where a humble pastor finds power and prestige that turns him into a monster. Too many people know the devastation of living in the aftermath of a narcissistic leader’s harm. There are pastors who no longer love the church, and former pastors who wonder if they will ever attend again. Hang around long enough, and you might experience a church split, church scandals, spiritual abuse, or toxic leadership. All of it can leave someone wondering whether they can ever invest themselves in such an unsafe place.

By the time I was eighteen, I had seen enough to question the church’s ability to be what it’s supposed to be. As much as I loved the church, it scared me. When one of my friends told me she could see me as a pastor one day, I had an answer already prepared: No, not a chance.

Instead, I became a therapist, which ironically (or perhaps not so ironically) is also supposed to be one of the safest places on earth. In my line of work, I get the opportunity to care for people the church has hurt. I have listened to stories of safety shattered, spiritual relationships harmed beyond repair, but also to friendships restored over years of work toward reconciliation. Stories like these are not limited to people with church hurt. Trauma survivors come from all walks of life, and I have had the privilege of walking alongside some of them. As we slowly and gently move toward responding to their stories, they show me what it means to experience harm and the cost of being vulnerable again.

As I think about my love for the church and its calling, I find myself wondering: What if the people who know the absence of safety actually have something to teach those of us meant to create and provide it?

Surely if trauma survivors can teach me—a licensed therapist trained for years to offer refuge and care—then surely they can teach the church, a people meant to become the safest place on earth.

What follows are seven things trauma survivors can teach the church.

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I didn’t know it at the time, but he was teaching me about forgiveness, even as he sat on my couch and employed me to help him learn how to forgive.

But the thing that happened matters less than the forgiveness he found and the resentment he lost.

When we started to meet, he never said, “I need you to help me forgive.”

This, I think, might be one of the reasons he eventually arrived at forgiveness. He never added that pressure to his grieving process. He never mentioned anything about forgiving and forgetting, which is surprising considering we live alongside people who preach, “forgive and forget”.

Forgive and Forget?
Forgive and forget. It sounds Christian, which is why Isla Gordon attributes the words to Jesus as she tries to win back sponsorships on Running Point. But Jesus never told us we had to forget as we forgive. The rest of us came up with the idea sometime in the 1300s, according to Google.

If anyone ever tells you to forgive and forget, consider the source. Who says it, and what they mean by it, matters. If spoken as a command or in “well-intentioned encouragement” from a friend who simply wants you to stop crying so she does not feel uncomfortable around your pain, then “forgive and forget” can add harm on top of harm.

No victim needs to be told to release someone from costly behavior and simultaneously erase memory of the loss. Would we tell a child who has just dropped her ice cream cone to stop crying and pretend she never wanted strawberry ice cream in the first place?

The heart is not wired to erase memory or to divide from itself. Lord Voldemort illustrates this well. In his attempt to preserve himself and become immortal, he systematically divides himself into seven parts, hidden in seven different horcruxes. So long as the horcruxes remain intact, he goes on living, but with an existence incapable of love and compassion. The more divided he becomes, the less capable of empathy and benevolence he becomes.

And over and over again, love defeats him.

Love will never ask us to forgive and forget. The loving path encourages forgiveness but never promises forgetfulness.

For His Own Sake
God lets us in on his own process of forgiveness in Isaiah 43:25: “I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more.”

We make a great deal about God’s forgiveness for our sake, understandably so. But rarely do we focus on God’s choice to forgive being his choice for his own good. We could misinterpret and call God selfish, or we could look through a wiser lens: God knows the heart, his own included, is wired for freedom and love. And while God would be right to do so, he chooses an existence where he does not hold a record of wrongdoing against his people. He forgives, because love is who he is, and he wants the freedom to love and be loved.

We get the same choice, to forgive for our own sake.

Forgiveness never denies truth and reality. Our body holds our story, physically, spiritually, and emotionally. Thus we should never put ourselves in a position to lie to ourselves in an attempt to make ourselves healthier people. If you cut your finger, it does you no good to tell yourself you are not hurt and do not see blood. Health requires telling the truth: I am hurt, and I need to care for my wound.

With or Against Ourselves
We either learn to live with ourselves or against ourselves. When it comes to wounds that require relational healing, forgiveness only becomes possible by living with ourselves. But if we tack on the need to forget as part of forgiveness, we cancel the “with”. Such pressure says, “Let’s live for ourselves while we also live against ourselves.” It will not work any more than you can walk upstairs while also walking downstairs.

For your own sake means starting from within and finding deeper understanding about what is best for you. It is best to live with yourself, and living with yourself means honoring your pain. This is not contrary to forgiveness. It is the starting point. We cannot release anyone from harm they have caused until we have first honored the harm they caused.

We start with feeling our feelings. We start with telling the truth. Honest. Unedited. Often with supervision. With care. And without a timeline or pressure to forget.

I have watched someone come to forgive after forty-five minutes working through hurt. And I have seen someone take three years to release resentment. The man I mentioned earlier was somewhere in between.

The thing about him was, he never tried to manage his process.

Emotions Run Through Us
The heart cannot be managed. As emotional creatures, we are made to feel our way through life. We hear a funny joke, and we laugh until the humor has moved through our system. We stop laughing not because the joke is no longer funny, but because we have processed its humor. Emotions run through us until they reach their finish line and move out of us.

This is as true with humor as it is with harm. When Nate Bargatze talks about donkeys jumping off a high dive, I laugh every time. And once my laughter subsides, I am ready for his next story.

But when harm comes, I try to shut the emotional process down immediately. My instincts move to defend myself from pain, and I go on lockdown. I want nothing to do with the hurt, shame, and whatever other emotions accompany harm. I end up acting against my emotion, against myself, and my imprisonment begins.

We need to learn to let harm move through us like humor.

Transforming Memory
Forgiveness transforms memory before it ever removes memory. Resentment loosens before remembrance fades. When pain is allowed to move through us honestly, something changes in the way we carry what happened. Sometimes we remember clearly, but no longer bitterly. Sometimes memory softens over time. And sometimes forgetting arrives quietly, not as something forced, but as something freely given.

This is why wisdom does not obsess over forgetting. Thomas Szasz said, “The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.”

Our job is not to forget, nor to try. It is to show pain to its lane and guide it to run its race.

Forgetting becomes a gift we sometimes receive when we forgive well. And it is only that, a gift. Never the goal.

I think back to God choosing forgiveness and forgetfulness for his own sake. Could it be God knows harboring resentment blocks him from the way he wants to live?

The Way of Love
One thing we do know: God is love. And so it must be in love that God chooses forgiveness and forgetfulness for his own sake. I hear the words of Frederick Buechner: “For both parties, forgiveness means the freedom again to be at peace inside their own skins and to be glad in each other’s presence.”

In the midst of hurts, harms, and traumas worthy of forgiveness, we move from processing our pain toward questioning what love looks like. And it looks different depending on the situation. Sometimes the loving thing is to set a boundary, a line in the sand that lets someone know how their behavior must change or what an apology must sound like before reconciliation can commence. Other times love looks like choosing to lower your boundary.

Boundaries, after all, are always an act of love, a line drawn to communicate: Because I care about relationship with you, I must show you what it looks like to be in a healthy relationship with me. When you can respect my boundaries, and I yours, we have the chance for connection and relationship.

When harm comes, boundaries must be reestablished. And of course it takes remembering, not forgetting, to set new lines.

In following God’s example, we move toward forgiveness for our own sake, which means starting with ourselves, from within and then moving outward in love.

This was true of the man I told you about, the man who taught me about the process of forgiveness while he allowed me to walk alongside him. As he talked about what happened to him, he learned to feel his way through it. He sat with harm done to him. He held people accountable. He met with them, told them to their face over coffee and pancakes. He came and talked with me some more. He received apologies. A few sounded genuine. They tried again at relationship and realized it might work again one day in the future, even if not for today.

And yet, as we kept talking, he lightened.

He released what he thought he would carry forever. And while he could still tell you what happened, he would do so without as much resentment.

He forgave and almost forgot because he learned to feel and tell the truth, walking in love, honoring loss and dignity, toward forgiveness.

And maybe that is what forgiveness finally gives us, not forgetfulness, but memory no longer heavy enough to keep us from love.

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A friend asked me the other day over coffee, “Does your work with people help you?”

I didn’t have to think long.

Yes, it does.

Mike Krzyzewski once said that coaching college kids kept him young. Working with people wrestling with life and relationships doesn’t necessarily keep me youthful, but it does help me live a more honest life. It shows me what courage looks like. It reminds me to desire deeper connections. It challenges me to show up in my own story with more presence.

When my friend asked the question, any number of people I’ve worked with could have come to mind. But I thought of one man in particular—not because of the details of his story, which aren’t mine to tell, but because of his smile when I greeted him.

“How are you?” I asked.

“I’m good today,” he said.

I don’t always know if the face I see in the waiting room will be the same face I see thirty seconds later on the couch. Small pleasantries often turn into big emotions after we shut the door. But that day I believed him. There was something about the way he met my eyes. His hand shook mine, firm and steady.

He told me about a week that did not necessarily seem to add up to a smile. He had spent much of the week navigating difficult relationships at his office and knew more uncomfortable conversations were coming. In previous sessions, we might have spent the entire time unpacking and preparing for conflict, but that day, he simply let me walk alongside him through the wreckage.

Somewhere in the telling, he told a story that reminded me of Jonah. While he sensed God moving him one way, he went the other. In doing so, he expected divine consequences to swallow him whole. Instead he found something different: God doesn’t need us and is not limited by our disobedience. He can still accomplish his goals without us, and sometimes, by grace, still invites us to share in the outcomes.

He smiled as he told his story, and I saw: this man knows God as a friend.

He finished the session by admitting some choices he was not proud of, but he was not overcome by guilt or shame. He could tell the truth about what he had done without letting what he had done become the whole truth about him.

As he shared, I felt the fullness of his week. In some moments, this man walked with God, and in others, he ran away. But as he shared, he gave me hope. I often run my own race believing that winning is for the faithful and well-behaved. Winning is for the self-confident, the ones with the highest score or fastest time. But this man, owning his defeats, somehow crossed the finish line sounding like he’d won. He humbly lived in a duality: faithful at times and disobedient at others. Aware of his worth without denying his limitations.

For fifty minutes this man showed me why he could smile.

He had told me he was good. And he was. Not because he had done everything right, but because his goodness was never something he had to manufacture.

And in all of this, he taught me about hope. He showed me how to run a different race.

It wasn’t the race I had always assumed hope required: Everything will get better. Master yourself. Live your best life. Win.

Winning, he showed me, wasn’t standing on a podium with gold, silver, or bronze. It was racing toward the arms of grace and discovering a friendship we cannot outrun.

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We are married to story—beyond “’til death do us part.” Forever, stories will take us places. What a wonderful thing. What a terrible thing. I wonder what it is li…

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The disciples came up and asked, “Why do you tell stories?” (Matthew 13:10 MSG)

Jesus told stories as his primary way of teaching. Some were simple, others baffling. When the disciples pressed him on …

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Fall is coming. So they say.

School is back in session, which means cross country, volleyball, golf, and football have begun. All the high school fall sports. But fall? Fall is anything but in the ai…

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In the process of seeking truth underneath the stories we tell ourselves, I’ve noticed a recurring pattern:

When we look outward, we write stories of fantasy. When we look inward, we write stories of …

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The stories we make up bring feelings we don’t want to feel. Yet within those unwanted feelings lies truth about who we are and how we are made. As the saying goes, there is truth in every lie. Our t…

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My mother-in-law keeps squirrel traps in her yard, trying to relocate the little guys who steal her birdseed. The squirrels wander in because they believe a lie: Easy food, no danger.

We’re not so dif…

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At orientation the summer before my freshman year of college, students had to pick a major. I got in line at the table for journalism. While I would not stay in that line for various reasons, the lure of writing a good story initially drew me.

Journalists possess the magical ability to capture a story. While I did not know it standing in line years ago, this art is meant for all of us, even if we never put it to paper or publish it as news. To live well emotionally and spiritually, we must learn from those who study stories, interpret them, and retell them accurately.

Last post (When Stories Turn Against Us) we talked about how falsely told stories move us away from our identity and presence. Living in the reality of ourselves and the people around us requires we take a page from the journalist: chase the story, put words to the tales you tell yourself, and learn to study the stories themselves. In the wake of the costs we explored last time, one of the best defenses is simple: own the stories you write.

But this doesn’t start with the stories. It starts with the storyteller.

Own the Storyteller Before Owning the Stories

Accountability starts with identity. All of us must get to know ourselves as a storytellers. You may not work for Time or post viral threads, but you probably tell more consequential stories than many professionals do. The books I read and the articles I skim rarely shape my life as much as the narratives I tell myself.

I am a powerful storyteller, just like you. And when I know my inclination to make sense of life with story, I can begin to notice when my mind starts to craft a tale.

One morning I made breakfast in the kitchen as one of my daughters walked downstairs. It was Saturday, and since she’s a teenager I usually don’t see her until 9 AM or later. But it was 6:25 AM. I thought: She must have woken up from a bad dream.

Then she said, “Dad, we have to leave in fifteen minutes.”

Right - she had work.

There I went again. Before even a bagel or coffee, I was writing stories in an attempt to make sense of the world. Catching that story early saved me from behaving on autopilot the rest of the day. And knowing I’m a storyteller gives me a pause button throughout any day.

Before we can see or engage the stories we write, we must first own our identity as storytellers.

As storytellers, we also must develop story-saving language.

Story-Saving Language

Somewhere in grad school I heard the phrase: “The story I am telling myself is…” Later a friend said it differently: “I make up that…” At first it sounded strange. Who talks like that? But eventually I tried it. The more I practiced, the more I realized the power of simple language to keep me tethered to reality.

That’s the invitation: pick a phrase you’ll actually use. When emotions rise, say it aloud or write it down. You might try:

• “The story I’m telling myself is…”

• “Right now I’m making up that…”

• “My narrative at the moment is…”

• “I notice this story: …”

• “Possibly true but possibly made-up story:”

Then name the story in a single sentence.

For me, that morning, it would have sounded like: The story I’m telling myself is that my daughter woke up early from a bad dream.

That captured the story and positioned me to engage her with curiosity instead of assumption.

What Happens When You Capture a Story

As you practice this, you’ll start to recognize “story mode” like a sixth sense. It feels like your mind is running a ticker tape across the sky, banner-plane style. Once the story is outside of you, on the horizon, visible, you can analyze it. You are no longer under its spell.

Here’s what happens when you capture stories like this:

• You remember you’re a storyteller. We forget. But catching a story helps us remember that we’re constantly writing scripts to make sense of life.

• You find humility. Storytelling is a gift for making judgments, but our judgments are often inaccurate or incomplete. Capturing the story keeps us honest about our limits.

• You create a boundary. Saying “I make up that…” draws a clear line between what’s happening inside you and what might be happening in someone else. Boundaries protect both sides.

• You pause. These phrases buy you a breath and a moment for thought. Decisions improve when we breathe and think.

• You see your reactivity. Most self-made stories center on me: my fears, my needs, my reputation. Naming the story helps expose that bias and gives you the chance to choose differently.

The act of capturing a story turns a narrative into an object you can examine, not a truth you must obey. Name the story. Examine it. Decide whether or how to act.

When Capturing Isn’t Enough

Sometimes, even after naming a story, you’ll find yourself still stuck inside it. In those moments, capturing isn’t enough. We also need to learn how to escape.

That’s where we’re headed next: The Escape Game.

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We took our girls to Disney World for the first time when they were six. By then they had seen all the classics. Cinderella, Tangled, Sleeping Beauty, and The Little Mermaid. After waiting sixty minutes in line to meet the princesses, I watched their expectant faces. They were about to meet the real ones.

And why wouldn’t they think so? There was the castle. Cinderella stood there in her gown. Smiling. Waving. Talking. What my daughters didn’t know was that every six hours, another young woman rotated into the costume. Cinderella didn’t drive off in a pumpkin carriage. She clocked out, walked to a car in a staff lot, and went home to a much smaller castle. My girls didn’t know that, and they didn’t care. They saw the dress, the smile, the setting. They believed the story: Cinderella was real, and she lived in Orlando.

Great storytelling allows us to enter life with a full and present heart. And for six year olds, I was happy my girls believed Cinderella lived in her castle in Orlando, Florida. I knew the power of the story served a great purpose, one that invited them into a reality deeper than fairy tales. Standing before the princesses, my girls entered a world that invited their hearts to dream about a story large enough for their young hearts to blossom. They knew beauty and adventure awaited them. They knew their worth and light would be revealed through the grace and power of love. And they knew in the end, good wins over evil.

Great stories have this effect on us. They help us see truths we already know but have somehow forgotten. They awaken us to realities deeper than the ones we often live from.

But stories can turn on us, too. Just as good storytelling carries the power of life, flawed stories, starting with the ones we tell ourselves, cost us dearly. Last time (Storytellers) I shared how I made up a story while rowing at the gym when I lost myself for a few minutes. In more costly cases, defective storytelling unravels us piece by piece.

Here are some of the most common costs.

Anxiety

Anxiety is both a spark and a fallout of poor storytelling. Consider the ways we make up stories about the future. How often does anxiety get us worrying about the unknown, the pitch-black space that is tomorrow and the days or months or years to come? The nothingness of not-happened-yet becomes a canvas for our anxiety to paint. 

A single woman told me about a wedding she dreaded. “No one will talk to me,” she stressed. She knew only the bride but had not seen her since childhood. Her mind spun lonely stories two weeks before attending. Nothing had yet happened, but in her mind, she already sat alone at a table in the far-off corner.

Anxiety writes flawed stories, and these stories feed us more anxiety in return. We spend our energy preparing for unwanted futures that exist only in our imaginations.

Lost Identity

Anxiety is usually the first domino to fall, but not the last. The next is identity.

Have you ever considered that humans are the only species to wrestle with identity? My dog never sits on the couch, paw-to-chin, wondering who he is. A deer enters the yard, and he barks. He walks by a tree and lifts his leg. He just acts like a dog. But me? I wonder about my identity all the time. In good moments and hard ones. And in the space between, I create narratives to both reassure and dismiss myself. I sit in meetings, assuming everyone else has the answers and I have nothing to offer. The story I tell myself rarely matches reality around me.

What a storyteller I am. In those moments, people miss out on me, and I miss out on myself.

I love a good story, except when the story does not love me back. Not only can we lose ourselves in a story, we can lose ourselves in a story. The former is often beautiful. The latter can be devastating. The flawed stories we tell take us out. Disconnected from our identity, we then lose our presence.

Lost Presence

False stories take us out of the present. When I rowed at the YMCA, I wasn’t there. I was elsewhere, lost in a script I made up. If a friend had tapped me on the shoulder, I would have struggled to place his name - not because I didn’t know it, but because I’d been shaken from another realm. How can we know someone else’s name while we do not know our own?

The bigger the false story, the further it pulls us from our own lives. Ask a recovering addict. Years are often spent in a haze, disconnected from self and others. One AA slogan captures it: S.O.B.E.R.—Son of a B#*@$ Everything’s Real. Sobriety is terrifying because reality comes rushing back. If we aren’t present to ourselves, we can’t be present to anyone else.

Lost Connection

And when presence falls, connection goes with it. 

Relationships make life worth living. Yet the stories we tell most often revolve around them: what others think of us, what we think of them, and what we think of ourselves as we interact with others. And too often, those stories sabotage the very connection we long for.

A mechanic once told me he and his girlfriend would never marry or have children. Curious, I asked why. As he replaced my radiator, he told me about an unfixable childhood: an alcoholic father, an absent mother, siblings left to fend for themselves. “Why would I bring a child into a world like that?” he asked.

His ability to imagine family had been hijacked by his past. 

How deeply we need help narrating our stories of pain. Flawed stories become poison to our capacity for connection.

• How many lose faith because they come to believe God is unloving?

• How many marriages collapse because spouses write horror stories about each other?

• How many lives end because someone believes they are unwanted?

The false stories we write diminish our ability to connect. Then the less connected we feel, the more false stories we create. The cycle pushes us into deeper isolation.

Rachel Scott’s father knows this too well. Since his daughter became the first victim in the Columbine shootings in 1999, he has worked to build kindness and connection in schools. In his talks to combat school violence, the statistics he shares are alarming but unsurprising: isolation breeds self-harm and violence.

Alone, we tell stories furthest from reality. The stories we make up there have the power to turn us against relationships as a whole. Isolation fuels false stories, and false stories fuel isolation. Left unchecked, they erode our capacity to value life itself.

Opportunities to Surrender

How often do we surrender to our limitations rather than writing a story to relieve us of our pain?

This question brings me back to the story of Joseph and his brothers in Genesis. Joseph’s father Jacob favored him above the other brothers. It was no secret. He clothed him better and gave him his ear as Joseph reported back on his brothers’ work. Joseph began to have dreams of taking authority over his brothers. When he shared them in detail, tales of his brothers bowing down to him, it was not hard for the brothers to fear their future and then begin to narrate it. They longed for what they didn’t have, and in their hunger they likely told themselves dangerous stories:

• Life would be better if we had our father’s attention. (Partly true.)

• We must take matters into our own hands. (Not true.)

• If we get rid of Joseph, we will have our father’s love. (Not true.)

So they acted, kidnapping Joseph and selling him off as a slave. And while God eventually worked good from their mess, it was still a mess.

We face the same temptation daily. There are things we want but cannot have and directions in life we cannot control. In our fear of the future, there are opportunities for surrender. But instead, we write stories to rescue ourselves from present and forecasted pain. Those stories rarely end well.

No one begins life wanting to live under false stories. But eventually, we all do. And the cost is high.

The question is not whether we will tell defective tales, but whether we will notice and learn to hold ourselves accountable as storytellers.

So long as we breathe, we will tell stories. We are made for them. The real work is learning to notice and then take proper action on the stories we tell. Whether we live connected to reality or spend our lives living apart from it depends on it.

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I saw them from above as they tanned by the pool. The husband sat at the pool’s edge, dangling his feet in the water. Beside him, his wife stretched out as if to catch some rays. It was 9 AM on a summer morning at the YMCA. Normally, kids on the swim team own the pool until 8. Then come the moms with toddlers, followed by senior citizens for aqua aerobics. But this couple didn’t fit any of those groups. I judged them to be in their fifties.

My morning clients had canceled, so I took the opportunity to close my workout rings. From the rowing machine overlooking the pool, I let my mind wander. The couple became a story.

I imagined the man was retired. His wife had raised their three kids, two in college, one finishing high school. Now they came to sit at the pool on a Thursday morning simply because they could. While the rest of the world worked, they got to sunbathe. What would it be like to retire early, to show up at the pool whenever I wanted, with nothing else pressing for the day? I wanted their ease, their happy kids, their overflowing bank account.

I wanted their life.

Then the man stood up. And just like that, the woman disappeared. This was not Hollywood magic where a character vanishes. Turns out she had never been there at all. What I thought to be a woman, wife, and mother was a pool bag, some towels, and a sunhat bunched together in the shape of a reclining figure. The man had been sitting alone the entire time.

I stopped rowing. I had made up a story, and I had wandered into it.

For a few minutes, or maybe only seconds, I had drifted out of my own life and into fantasy. I fabricated characters and plotlines to soothe myself, to reconcile some longing in me with the story I wished I were living. But unlike Dorothy in Oz, I wasn’t asleep. I was wide awake, pulling the row bar to my chest while slipping out of reality.

What was I chasing? What was I running from? Answering those questions matters if I want to return fully to my own story. What struck me first, though, was the shock: I had left myself again, and for so little reward.

I miss too much of my real life by escaping into imagined ones.

In those minutes of exercise, I did a poor job of being Luke. I got lost, and I lost me.

But I know I’m not alone. Story-making is a universal human reflex. We do it to seek the life we long for and to escape the exile we feel.

And before this sounds too critical, let me say this: it is not wrong to make up stories. Storytelling is one of humanity’s great gifts. Your capacity to craft a story is as sacred as your capacity to love. God hardwired us for story. We’re made for it. Yes, we consume stories for entertainment (thank God for C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, and Shakespeare). But our wiring goes far deeper than amusement. We learn best through story. We interpret the cosmos through story. We script our very lives by the larger story we believe reality to be.

The stories we believe, write, and consume bless us when they help us live more fully in truth. At its best, storytelling enriches life and gives us courage to face it. At its worst, like all good things, it can lead us astray. This reflex can be both a gift and a trap.

What follows in the coming posts are reflections on the ways our storytelling can help, or hinder, our growth, and how we can use this gift wisely.

Because here’s the truth: you are a storyteller. Whether you’ve published twenty books or spin bedtime tales for a four-year-old, you carry this gift. As Lewis reminds us, “Someday you will be old enough to read fairy tales again.”

Maturity moves us back toward story. Sometimes that looks like rediscovering Twain, Brontë, or Spielberg. Other times, it’s learning to tell better stories to ourselves.

And as the stories we tell go, so often do we.

—

Next Post: Defective Storytelling: The Cost of Poor Storytelling

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EMILY: Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?

STAGE MANAGER: No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some.

— Thornton Wilder, Our Town

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We met, either by divine will or Southwest’s new seating policy. On planes, proper introductions come last. You learn the stories first. Where are you from? W…

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When a house is on fire, do we let it burn?

The obvious answer is no.

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and it isn’t my house?

I live here. Others do, too.

The fire ignited before I moved in.
I did not see smoke.

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Do I really want to be like God?

It sounds noble to want God’s character, but when love costs us something, most of us reach for power instead, and that choice reveals more about our hearts than we’d like to admit.

That fork shows up as two trailheads. Both catch our attention because they reflect glimpses of the divine. Something inside whispers: Follow this way. And we do. But the two trails diverge, and they end in very different places—one taking us far from God and far from ourselves, the other taking us deeper into both.

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As I listened to my friend’s pain and pursuit of his daughter, I thought back to the Tower of Babel and the ways our culture still chases after godlikeness. At first the story sounds almost childish—stacking bricks to the sky, as if heaven could be reached by scaffolding. Any child with a bucket of Legos has dreamed the same. He dumps his blocks, stacks them higher and higher, and when the tower finally eclipses the couch he shouts, “Mom! Come and see!” That is the heart of a child: curiosity, possibility, a need for encouragement.

But Babel’s “come and see” had a darker ring. It was less, Come and celebrate with us, and more, Come and look up at us. Come and see what we have built without God. Come and bow down.

That contrast frames the surrounding chapters of Genesis. In chapter 10, God is creating again after the flood—life and family spreading across the earth. In chapter 12, He is creating again through Abraham—covenant, promise, relationship. But in chapter 11, humanity takes creation into its own hands. Like Eden, Babel is planning without God, creating for power, control, and a name for themselves.

In a sense, they are only doing what we instinctively do. Whether we know God or not, we will pursue godlikeness. The real question is how we go about it.

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