we are connected by our stories. EspeCIALLY our hard ones.

​I spoke at a DUI Specialty Dockets event earlier this week. In my mind I was going to be speaking to a relatively small crowd. But when I arrived, the reality became something different.

There were over 400 people in the audience. Many of them judges and elected officials. I don't often feel uneasy - unqualified - before speaking to a group. But I confess, I felt immediately uneasy. Unqualified.

I opened with words I had no intention of opening with. But something inside me told me, pushed me, if I was going to connect with this group, it was going to be through my story and not through information they'd heard a thousand times.

So, I told them about the kid who fell in love with alcohol at the age of 12.

About the kid who spent his high school years experimenting with pills and creating opportunities to stay drunk in secret.

I told them about the kid who turned into a college student whose love affair with alcohol turned into an abusive relationship. With alcohol and with everyone around me.

I told them about my own DUI in my mid-twenties.

I told them about being sentenced to a 72-hour inpatient treatment program.

I told them about the man I met there. He was standing on the front porch. He looked old and unkempt and fully given up on life. I looked at him and thought, "what am I doing here with these people?"

These people.....

I had a group session with "these people". I remember the old man telling the story of his life. The story of where he'd been and not who he was.

I didn't know it then, but it was my first really big hint; where we've been has a whole lot to do with who we are. An unkempt present usually has a lot to do with an unkempt past. A love of alcohol is often the best way to hide from the kind of love we longed for and could never find.

And a lot of us looking at people and wondering 'what am I doing here with these people' - we one day wake up and realize more than we ever knew, I am one of these people.

I think it's important for judges and elected officials and court workers and pastors and friends and well - everyone, to know that.

I could see and feel people connecting with my story. I no longer felt uneasy. Because when you share your real story with people it connects with the real story in them. Maybe it even leaves them wishing they could stand up and tell theirs.

Our stories are a gift to one another. I'm sure I first learned that from a man I judged well before I knew his story. I'm sure that's when I first discovered my judgments have no place in the land of healing.

My story does.

Our stories do.