Mustard Doesn't taste good by itself

​You couldn't pay me to eat a spoonful of mustard. Well, maybe you could, but it would cost you.

There's just something so detestable about mustard as a solo party.

The thing is, don't give me a cheeseburger without it. I even like putting a little bit of mustard in when I'm cooking chili. Mustard doesn't do well alone, but mixed in with other ingredients, it can become a don't leave home without it.

I've been spending a lot of time lately writing the story of my life. I've been doing it a lot like I do here many mornings. I pick a period or an event or a relationship or a topic and I reflect on it. And the thing is, those articles alone - well some of them aren't feel good articles.

I would never want my whole life to look and feel like some of those individual articles.

That's the beauty of it. It's part of the discovery of it. I haven't lived my whole life in those articles. Those articles have become a part of my story. They are a page in a book. But they are not the story.

The book isn't finished. Neither am I. But both are close enough to the end that you can see that life is never about a moment or an event in isolation. Life, like a book, is a collection. It's a gathering of isolated stories that make up the whole.

In fact, I think we can get to believing that those isolated moments add value and meaning to our story, but maybe just as much - if not more - it's the finished story; it's our life - that adds meaning to those isolated moments.

In the midst of moments, some moments can feel hard. And when it feels like hard is never going to end it's hard to imagine how hard belongs in the story. This doesn't fit into the narrative I long for in life.

As you write the story of your life, and live it, you come to realize a couple of things. One, it's very rare, if ever at all, that life follows the path of the narrative we long for. That's not how the story of life gets lived. And two, it's often the moments in our life we want to kick to the curb while we are in them that end up playing the leading roles in our story.

You can't see that when you're in it. Life ends up telling the story of those moments more than those moments tell the story of life.

I suppose it's a lot like mustard. I think cheeseburgers do a much better job at telling the story of mustard than mustard ever could.

You may be in a hard moment today, or this week, or this year. Try to have faith. Life will tell the story of this moment. And likely, the story will be much more beautiful than it feels right now.