The Story We Find Ourselves In

I just wish none of all of this had ever happened.  I wish I could plan a trip and actually go, I wish I could just come to school and teach, I wish could just go to the snow on my weekend without having to prove the state of my health, I wish I didn’t have to cancel my little boy’s birthday party…again. And the thing is I’m also kind of powerless to do anything about it. 

It reminded me of the title of a book I read quite a few years ago: “The Story We Find Ourselves In.”  Now, I don’t want to unpack anything from the book, but I think the title is an interesting way of expressing how I’ve been feeling. 

The story we find ourselves in…not sure how it happened, but here we are. 

I used to be able to follow the plot - to look ahead and see what might happen next.  But I think we’re all feeling that we're in the middle of a story that’s playing out but it’s really hard to know what might happen next…like some kind of Scandinavian detective thriller. 

I once did a driving holiday around the UK with my younger brother.  He was the map reader and I was driving – like a rally team we navigated the complex lane changes and hundreds of roundabouts – although I did miss an instruction that caused a missed turn and then stagnation in a three hour traffic jam. 

We became really close on that journey – we understood each other, good, bad and in the random stuff. 

Last year my wife Christine indicated she would like a picnic table for her birthday. A simple wooden picnic table like you see at the park.  So we found an old but nice table from a hire place that didn’t need it any more and we set it up in our front yard. 

During the lockdowns, and in the days since, this table has become a bit of a gathering point for us – and not just us, but some of our neighbours as well.  In fact, most people who come to visit our house are likely to have spent some time sitting out at the table.  It’s a bit of a sacred space actually.

I was moving some mulch to the backyard last summer and Christine took a book and a cup of tea out to the table.  Each time I came back with my wheelbarrow another one of our neighbours had come to sit down and chat.  After about half an hour, three women from our street had sat down with her and stayed for over an hour talking together with different understandings of faith.  It was a space to gather, but on reflection it was also a space to allow God to move and bring to fruit what work he had set aside to be done there. 

How do we figure out what’s going on?  I guess we can carve out some space, space to share our stories and listen to others’ stories. That’s what I love about our staff devotions each day.  We can hear others’ stories, we can hear our students’ stories.  And even when we don’t know what’s going on in the broader narrative, we can at least understand a bit better our place in this part of the story. 

And we know that God is the author, and it’ll all come together in the end.