Mastering the meaning of our stories

​Several weeks ago, I received an email notifying me that I'd been chosen by a committee to receive an award at an upcoming conference. The award would recognize me for being a community resilience champion.

To be honest, after reading the email, I felt uneasy.

I wrestled with that feeling for quite some time. At the heart of the wrestling I suppose was recognizing that I'd spent a lot of time the last few years promoting resilience as a 'we' thing - we are in this together - and not a measure of one's individual strength or grit or determination.

Yet, there I would be, at a resilience conference, center stage, an individual, holding an award. Maybe it felt like the award would go totally against the grain of what I believe about resilience?

I honestly felt that way all the way up to listening to yesterday morning's keynote speaker, Father Paul Abernathy. In his talk, Father Abernathy said community resilience often starts with identifying people in communities who have two characteristics of resilience.

One, they are master meaning makers of their own story. And two, they have transcended their stories to a place of finding a higher purpose for those stories.

Eight years ago, I sat in a presentation at a conference where I first heard with any meaningful insight a conversation about trauma and resilience. I say often my life changed in that presentation. And I have also said I learn a little bit more each day about the depth and the magnitude of that change.

Maybe yesterday was the biggest day of learning in that whole learning journey.

Yesterday, I realized I answered a call eight years ago. I answered a call to start making meaning of what had been (and continues to be) a broken life. Many days a life that can look and feel broken beyond repair.

I didn't know at the time I was receiving a call, or answering one, but day by day along the way of this journey, God has offered quiet signs that He and I are on a resilience journey together.

We.

God works that way. He often whispers signs, but there are times, if our senses are wide open, God will deliver his signs with booming precision.

When I was called to the stage yesterday, I felt one of those booms.

And what I heard God say was thank you. Oh, how we serve a grateful God.

He said thank you for realizing there is as much meaning in broken stories as their is in mended stories. Maybe more.

He said thank you for discovering that broken may feel lost on earth, but in heaven broken often looks like the path to forever found.

He said thank you for discovering that the greatest value in mastering the meaning of your own broken story is coming to feel the pain others are suffering through in their own broken stories. And in that feeling, sensing the call to become a meaning maker in their lives.

And then I said thank you.

Thank you for making meaning in my life God where meaning would have never been found. Not ever.

Thank you for all of the beautiful people you've brought into my life who've in many ways pointed me to and shared in and become that meaning.

Thank you God that although you are often a whisper, you can with great precision show up as a boom. Right when we need to hear and feel it.

If you are feeling broken in any way today, let me assure you there is great meaning in that brokenness. A meaning that goes well beyond the often dire stories you tell yourself about that brokenness.

Well beyond the stories others might tell you about it.

Walk to the edge of the wilderness. And keep walking there. Day after day. And I promise you, one day you will discover a path. Travel that path often enough and you'll eventually hear a boom.

Chances are, it will sound like thank you.

Thank you.