I wonder if story-telling is the soul making a backup.
This occurred to me yesterday when I found myself telling someone new the same stories that I’ve told every other someone-new in recent memory. This is perhaps just me choosing the same well-worn introductory tracks as a time-saver, here’s who I am in a hundred words or less, but that’s a non-starter if I’d rather talk about how I’m pretty sure none of us are only ourselves. So!
I posit that we are, more truly than we normally sense or experience, a network, and that love is another word for flow within that network. Also that the story-telling instinct exists to spread around the only things we truly have ourselves — our particular time- and context-bound experiences, and the impressions they’ve made on us. So that, when we as individuals are gone, we as deltas will live on.
Abe’s dad is here for the weekend. He’s actually the “someone new” that I mentioned earlier; I went with that descriptor seeing as how yesterday was the first time that he and I had any meaningful amount of time together. The guy’s incredible. Or (and? because?), he gets out of the way of Jesus. I’m sitting here typing and looking at a pad of notes that I was jotting down during our conversation — all variations on a theme, that it’s just God, and us, and freedom in love. For there is now no condemnation. We are all created different, with different flaws — yet God wants to have a relationship with us all. And can. (And that’s the proof, I think. Love wins, across every single combination of flaws and faults, because love is the act of connecting without regard to flaws and faults. It can do nothing but win.)
Anyway though, Rudy gets it. “We may not understand each other,” he said, “we may not be the same … ‘but hello!’”. Hello, my friend, hello person that I don’t understand or agree with. Hello, how are you?
Here’s a thing he’s realized in this last decade: “Jesus created me, for this moment. And the more in tune I am to Jesus, the more peace I have but alsothe more I fit in to His plan. […] Acknowledge His love, and that His love has us here.”
And that’s not a thing I’d registered before, in those terms. There’s almost an urgency to it. If you assume the perspective that your particular combination of flaws and faults has significant potential in the presence of love, and further that love is omnipresent, then every moment becomes manifestly purposeful. You are here, unavoidably; from there, you can be merely yourself, or you can choose love, and be the network. The family, the village, the love, the kingdom, I don’t know what word to use here. In love, in connection, there is more than just me. Thankfully.
If story-telling is making backups, it’s a sign that we’re subconsciously, fundamentally, oriented upward, into the larger stream, which I think is all we ever were.
Onward and upward.
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