Feeling joy in someone else's story

​After presenting to local school personnel yesterday, a colleague and I decided to eat lunch together before going our separate ways. One of the participants in the training said we needed to check out the Lasterday Market.

It's just up the road, she said.

I looked just up the road. A long look. And in Craig County Virginia, when you look just up the road, it's very difficult to imagine anything but mountains up ahead, because that is certainly all you see. Finding a place to eat there would seem as likely as finding the White House.

But sure enough, just a few minutes up the road, we pulled into the Lasterday Market.

The Lasterday market looked a lot more like a large shed than a restaurant. And the sign on the door said they closed at 1PM; it was just after 12:30.

But we ventured inside nonetheless.

The young lady who greeted us from behind the counter assured us we were just in time. As part of that assurance she went out of her way to sell us on some of the most delicious food and coffee I've had in a very long time.

She did it all with an infectious joy.

I asked her, did you grow up around here?

No, she said. I'm actually new here. We've only been here a few months.

How did you get here, I asked her. I am always curious how people end up in deeply secluded places like I was sitting in if they weren't born there.

We were looking for a bigger farm, she said. And this is where we found it.

What kind of a farm do you have, I asked her.

She grinned, ear to ear, with pride and not amusement. I have five bee hives and a bunch of dwarf goats, she said. If you come back in a few months you can see my baby dwarf goats. You'll love them.

For a moment, her answer caught me off guard. I grew up on a farm in Ohio, deep in farm territory. Farms had corn and soy beans and wheat and cows and sheep and pigs. Farms did not have bee hives and dwarf goats.

Did anyone on the farms I grew up on even know there is such thing as a dwarf goat?

We go there sometimes. We go to a place of hearing someone's story through the narrative of our own stories. And if we're not careful, we start to make their story a less beautiful thing simply because it doesn't look like our story.

We minimize the joyful character someone is playing in their story simply because we can't imagine them being a character in our story.

But the thing is, her joy WAS suddenly my joy. Her story WAS suddenly my story because I invited myself into it and her story was now something we shared.

Shared so deeply that I found myself wanting to hug one of those baby dwarf goats (and may have told her I'd be back to do just that) before they were even born.

How much joy do we miss out on trying to squeeze people into our stories when they are already living out some incredibly beautiful stories of their own?

And how much joy do we miss out on squeezing ourselves so deep into our own stories that we are no longer curious about the stories people live out around us?

You know, stories about the goats and the bees....

It's a far more beautiful world out there than we can imagine. That is, of course, unless we take some time to imagine it more beautiful than our own stories.

Imagine. And take some time to ask someone about their story.