History, not a place to live but something to write

​Understanding history can be helpful. Helpful, that is, until history is the place we decide to live.

At a resilience conference this week, a speaker challenged us to stop seeing history as something that happened to us and instead start seeing history as something we write.

Then yesterday, I listened to a pastor recount the genealogy of Jesus. If you go to the first chapter of Matthew and take a scan of Jesus' family tree, you'll find thieves and liars and adulterers and prostitutes and all kinds of broken hanging from His tree. And yet, Jesus never once tried to re-write the history of that tree; Jesus was all about writing a history for the you and me who were generations away from joining that tree.

None of this is to say we can or should look at history and say no big deal. But the reality is, the bigger the deal our history is, the more necessary it often is to become someone who will get focused on writing history and not living in it.

I think of people like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela and Edith Eger. People who had histories that had to make them feel like writing history seems inconceivable, and yet they took upon themselves the mission of writing history anyway.

And there's you and me, who maybe we aren't trapped in histories as challenging as racism and holocaust, but does it matter what history we're trapped in if that history has convinced us we can't write a new history for our kids, and for their kids, and for kids 14 generations from now?

I've thought about resilience this week within a question, a personal challenge of sorts, am I writing history or living in it?

Over the last several years, making meaning of my history has become important to me. Helpful and healing. In the making of that meaning, I've come to understand just how many years I spent living in history.

Or maybe more true, hiding in it and from it.

Someday, my boys will look back at their history. And when they do, oh, I know they'll surely find plenty of the sins of Abraham and David and Rahab and Jacob and Solomon.

But I hope they'll also see a little Jesus.

I hope they'll see the man, who, in spite of living a large chunk of his life stuck in history, eventually turned into a man committed to writing history. Largely inspired by and motivated by his desire for his sons to become history writers long before he did.

What about you? Are you living in history or writing it? The beautiful thing about that question is it's never too late to change the answer.

For if I've learned anything in this life, it's that it's never too late to start writing.