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PART THREE

Your Story From Here

“…And so Jesus gave us a new norm of greatness. If you want to be important—wonderful. If you want to be recognized—wonderful. If you want to be great—wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. That’s a new definition of greatness. And this morning, the thing that I like about it: by giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve…You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve…You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love. And you can be that servant.” (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., The Drum Major Instinct sermon, Feb. 4, 1968)

Congratulations! You’ve done some hard, important work in Part One, “Your Story As It Is,” and Part Two, “Your Story As It Could Be.” Part Three helps you incorporate what you’ve already discovered into “Your Story From Here.”

If you’re like us, you’re probably feeling like you’re in over your head at this point. That’s good. You are! True callings of service are bigger than we are, pulling us along and into a bigger story than we’re used to living. That’s why we should all undertake this journey with people we trust. They can encourage and support and look out for us during the journey, and vice versa.

In the 1920s and ’30s a man named Bill became an alcoholic. Despite receiving care at a nationally-known hospital for the mental and physical rehabilitation of alcoholics, his life continued in a downward spiral. At that time experts believed alcoholism was incurable, but one day an encounter with an old friend led Bill into a journey of faith and community with fellow alcoholics that changed his life forever. Bill later founded Alcoholics Anonymous. The peer-based, 12-step process it developed continues to help free alcoholics and others from serious addictions.

We believe a similar principle applies to us — groups of committed laypeople can tackle impossible, intractable issues together and see amazing things happen as a result. The key, as it is for AA and other 12-step groups, is sharing our stories—telling, owning and living stories of service that connect us in tangible ways with the needs of others around us.

A little helpful review

Get out your summaries from the end of Part One, “Your Story As It Is,” and Part Two, “Your Story As It Could Be.” You’ll use both of them, along with all your answers (and your group’s answers) to the previous two steps, to consider where you and your story could go from here. Rather than identify a fool-proof checklist or five steps to divining the perfect answers to your future, we have some more questions below for you to answer and discuss with your group.

Don’t worry, we’ll point you to some supplemental resources that offer plenty of acronyms, steps and checklists. What we’re attempting to do here is help you think narratively instead of propositionally (i.e. “Just give me the answers already!”), because we believe life is more like a story than an encyclopedia. The more we learn to “read” our stories and the stories of others around us, the better we’ll be able to “write” and “share” and live good stories with our lives.

As you’ve no doubt realized, we use “calling” synonymously with “vocation,” which comes from the Latin “vocare,” meaning “to call, summon, invoke.” “Vocation” has the sense of being called, of having something called out of us, of being unique suited for something. For that reason it’s often associated with religious careers, but we believe it also applies more broadly to every person, since we’re all part of a bigger story. None of us is exempt from the “call” to be truly human, to steward, tend and care for each other and to join our Creator in working to bring healing and restoration to this wonderful, hurting creation. We refer to this human “call” as our “calling of service,” something that is at the same time universal and unique to each individual.

“If you can’t get out of it, get into it!” (Outward Bound motto)

“We have to dispel the myth that you really have to know what you’re doing before you start doing it. Just accept the fact that you’re going to make some mistakes. Everybody does…Offering whatever you have and whatever you are is ‘enough.’” (from Jim Wallis’s Faith Works: Lessons from the Life of an Activist Preacher)

The process of discovering and living out our calling of service is:

  • Provisional — It’s always unfolding, which means we have to make room in our lives for it to unfold. It rarely happens overnight, though people do occasionally “get called” via a burning bush or a dip in a river or getting blinded on a business trip.
  • Incarnational — Living a more integrated, other-centered, servant-like life is like going on a long journey or pilgrimage. It can’t be done by proxy. It involves lots of trial and error. We have to take the first step, to stand face-to-face and wrestle with it, to set off into the unknown.
  • Emotional — Like any creative enterprise into which we dive heart and soul, it can be painful or joyful or both at the same time. Sharing the stories of people who are suffering hurts.
  • Seasonal — We live it out differently during different chapters/stages/seasons of our lives. The calling itself doesn’t change, but our expression of it does. How we live it out as young adults might be different than how we live it out in our golden years.
  • Perpetual — A calling or vocation of service is not the same as volunteering or volunteerism. Volunteering can be something that you do on the side, an hour a month, when you carve out the free time. A calling of service is  24/7/365. It’s not a hat you can take on and off at will. It’s your reason for living, your unique, ongoing gift to the world. It’s never far from your mind. It occupies your time and your resources. It’s as true of you when you’re at work as it is when you’re on vacation. In the same way, true calling lasts from our “aha!” moment (and perhaps even before it) to our final breath. It’s necessarily long-term, because it can only properly unfold in all its expressions and details over time.
  • Intergenerational — As we’ve mentioned before, we believe callings of service apply to individuals, and to families, groups of friends, faith communities and other communities, which suggests that true calling survives even the death of “a founder.” For example, let’s say a suburban dad who’s married with four kids senses he and his family have been called to help restore a run-down area of an inner city. The family moves there, the parents work there, the kids go to school there. The dad is a gifted builder who negotiates deals between the city and private contractors to begin rebuilding their neighborhood, the mom welcomes neighbors and their kids into their home, the kids observe their parents, helping them serve meals at the local soup kitchen every week. The kids grow up. One becomes a teacher, one a doctor, one an administrator and one a builder. The teacher gets a job at a local elementary school and lives nearby. The doctor, who loves working with people, and the administrator, who loves planning and working with numbers, start a free medical clinic in the neighborhood. The engineer marries a lawyer and moves to a different city, but they return twice a year to help their sister the administrator oversee the construction of low-cost housing and do pro-bono work with homeless and low-income families in the area. Eventually, the parents die, but the family’s calling continues and grows.

Integrating “Your Story As It Is” and “Your Story As It Could Be”

Your character

How have Part One and Part Two changed the way you look at your story. Do you see it as a series of disjointed episodes or is it interconnected or both? Explain your answer.

Refer back to Henri Nouwen’s three statements from Part One and your answers to the follow-up question. Do you now see yourself differently? If so, how? If not, why not? You could have many jobs or work for many companies, but what remains true of you throughout?

Who are you and what do you now want to live for? What is the overarching purpose for your life?

Your plot

What needs to change about the trajectory of your story from here? What choices do you need to make now related to how you spend your time, how you make your living and how you spend your money, how you find the strength to live the good story to which you feel called, and who you do it all with? (There are lots of ways to make decisions: intuition, imitation, conformity, chance. We designed the three parts of “Listen to Your Story” to help “let your life (story) speak.” In combination with wise counsel and a community of people you trust, we believe this process can help you make the decisions you need to make.)

How might you creatively reconstruct the different parts of your life to make it easier for you to live out your calling of service (living situation, job situation, etc.)?

What do you want to stay the same in your story? What do you need more time to figure out?

Your desire

Recall how you filled in the blank in Part Two, “My greatest passion in life is_______________________.” How does that passion most closely connect to the world’s deep hunger as you currently understand it? (Example: Let’s say you’re passionate about kids and the outdoors, there are plenty of kids who need mentors and have never experienced the outdoors, and there are plenty of places in the outdoors that will no longer be there to be enjoyed by kids, if they are not better stewarded, protected and managed now.)

What difference do you want your life to make in the world? How could you go about building your legacy and “monument”? (You considered that question in Part Two.)

Your idea

After going through this process, how would you answer if someone asked you, “What is it that you stand for?”

How might you look at your dreams, job, schedule, finances, relationships and spirituality differently now? How do they give you opportunities to serve those in need?

Your conflict/challenge

Where is your industry/work/discipline in pain? How could you help alleviate it?

Where are people in your neighborhood or city in need? How could you help them?

What are the one or two biggest problems/places/people in need that stood out to you as you completed Parts One and Two? How much do you know about them? Start here if you’d like to learn more about a specific area of need. Start here if you know where you want to help serve but need some ideas about how to get started.

Once again, when we refer to “serving” we’re not just talking about volunteering once a month at your local shelter or setting up chairs for your faith community’s next meeting, though those things might be incorporated into your overall calling of service. When we refer to “serving” we’re referring to how you uniquely live out your story and use your gifts and experiences to help alleviate the world’s deep hunger. Your calling of service should be the practical foundation on which the rest of your life and story rest. (For all of us, regardless of creed ocation of service arises from and rests upon their faith.)

Your summary

Hopefully, answering all these questions has helped clarify your calling of service and given you some ideas as to where and how you might start living it out. Remember, you’re living in the middle of a story. If we’ve done our job, then this process has been a sort of “inciting incident” for you. That’s the technical screenwriting term for the pivotal event in a story that forces the main character to undertake a journey of exploration, discovery or recovery, against all odds.

Try to integrate your two previous summaries (of “Your Story As It Is” and “Your Story As It Could Be”) in order to come up with a present-tense summary of “Your Story From Here.” Unlike your other two summaries, this one should focus on how you want to tangibly go about living in light of your vocation of service. Just as before, refer to yourself in the third-person (he, they).

Step back and evaluate your new summary as if you were a screenwriter. Does it appeal to you? Is it worthy of being made into a screenplay?

Now that you have an idea what you want “Your Story From Here” to look like:

Regardless of what you do next, please let us know about your experience with “Listen to Your Story.”