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Christmas Stories

There are so many wonderful stories centered around the Christmas tradition. From The Little Drummer Boy to The Christmas Candle, authors have worked to capture the heart of the Christmas season. One of my favorite short stories is by the author Annie Dillard titled “God In The Doorway”  It de-scafolds so much and always places a smile on my face while I read it. So enjoy Annie’s Christmas glimpse:

God In The Doorway

One cold Christmas Eve I was up unnaturally late because we had all gone out to dinner-my parents, my baby sister, and I. We had come home to a warm living room, and Christmas Eve. Our stockings drooped from the mantle; beside them, a special table bore a bottle of ginger ale and a plate of cookies.

I had taken off my fancy winter coat and was standing on the heat register to bake my shoe soles and warm my bare legs. There was a commotion at the front door; it opened, and cold winter blew around my dress.

Everyone was calling me. “Look who’s here! Look who’s here!” I looked. It was Santa Claus. Whom I never-ever-wanted to meet. Santa Claus was looming in the doorway and looking around for me. My mother’s voice was thrilled: “Look who’s here!” I ran upstairs.

Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus, thinking he was God. I was still thoughtless and brute, reactive. I knew right from wrong, but had barely tested the possibility of shaping my own behavior, and then only from fear, and not yet from love. Santa Claus was an old man whom you never saw, but who nevertheless saw you; he knew when you’d been bad or good. He knew when you’d been bad or good! And I had been bad.

My mother called and called, enthusiastic, pleading; I wouldn’t come down. My father encouraged me; my sister howled. I wouldn’t come down, but I could bend over the stairwell and see: Santa Claus stood in the doorway with night over his shoulder, letting in all the cold air of the sky. Santa Claus stood in the doorway monstrous and bright, powerless, ringing a loud bell and repeating Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas. I never came down. I don’t know who ate the cookies.

For so many years now I have known that this Santa Claus was actually a rigged-up Miss White, who lived across the street, that I confuse the dramatis personae in my mind, making Santa Claus, God, and Miss White an awesome, vulnerable trinity. This is really a story about Miss White.

Miss White was old; she lived alone in the big house across the street. She liked having me around; she plied me with cookies, taught me things about the world, and tried to interest me in finger painting, in which she herself took great pleasure. She would set up easels in her kitchen, tack enormous slick soaking papers to their frames, and paint undulating undersea scenes: horizontal smears of color sparked by occasional vertical streaks which were understood to be fixed kelp. I liked her. She meant no harm on earth, and yet half a year after her failed visit as Santa Claus, I ran from her again.

That day, a day of the following summer, Miss White and I knelt in her yard while she showed me a magnifying glass. It was a large, strong hand lens. She lifted my hand and, holding it very still, focused a dab of sunshine on my palm. The glowing crescent wobbled, spread, and finally contracted to a point. It burned; I was burned; I ripped my hand away and ran home crying. Miss White called after me, sorry, explaining, but I didn’t look back.

Even now I wonder: if I meet God, will he take and hold my bare hand in his, and focus his eye on my palm, and kindle that spot and let me burn?

But no. It is I who misunderstood everything and let everybody down. Miss White, God, I am sorry I ran from you. I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain. So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.

*Taken from…”Teaching a Stone to Talk” by Annie Dillard

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Act Well Your Part

Our lives are wrapped up in, surrounded by, and playing out a myriad of stories. Each story intersects another, which intersects another. All flowing from an over-arching narrative that continues its march towards a close.

When we turn on our cable TV or Dish system, we are submerging our minds and time into more stories. Some real, like on the news, some fictional as in sit-coms, and others with a slice a realism, but not really, when we watch Reality TV.

I was talking with a friend this week and the topic of superstar pastors came up. We bobbed and weaved around the stories of some pastors who started their ministry really attuned to two different stories. First, they were attuned to the overarching narrative of God at work in the world and why that matters for everyone. Second, we noted  how they were , (at least at the onset) attuned to the stories of the people they were ministering to.

As we looked at how their churches and ministries changed over the years it seemed most often the change was not in a positive direction. We wondered aloud, why, and where did the story change for them? When did they stop listening to God’s story and the people’s and begin to think that only their own personal story mattered?

I like the way my friend articulated it, he said, “It’s like they started to drink their own Kool-aid” I think he was right. They began to believe their own press, and their story became so big that other peoples story and God’s story was edged out.

In An Essay on Man, Alexander Pope wrote: “Act well your part, there all the honour lies.” I like that thought. Yes you do have a story. You do have a part to play in the larger stage production of life. Yes, your story is important…but yours is not the only story, and in fact, your character development gets better and better as you move away from a narcissistic view of life and instead move toward an integrative way of life. Life affecting life…story enlarging story…and the Kool-aid stays away.

Sometimes we are more focused on changing other peoples stories…this rarely turns out well. We don’t like their story so we try to change it, more specifically we try to change them! We become the Holy Spirit demanding how we want their story to play out, and if they don’t change the script we erase their story from our book.

Sometime we forget that life gifts us with chapters. Our story has moments when one chapter ends, and a fresh new chapter begins. When we think life is one long never ending chapter, we tend to drag the past around from scene to scene spoiling any opportunity to to experience something different. Our suitcase of pain, unhealthy emotional damage, and trauma show up in every scene.

When a chapter ends, stop, re-calibrate, realize the next chapter can be different! Thast is the power of God at work in you. 2 Corinthian 5:17 unleashes a new reality…the old has gone, the new has come. Your relationship with God ushers in the ability to continually morph the story in positive ways…to navigate through painful chapter in amazing way.

Confession and repentance create new paragraphs, chapters, and potentialities because the realign you with the heart of God and His presence submerges us in infinite possibilities.

Today you have been handed a new script and you get to write it with God. It doesn’t matter where you were in the last chapter, you can change it in today’s chapter. I agree with Pope in that how we act out our story matters. If we would remember that ours is not the only story, and that it is perhaps not even the most important one, and choose to live out our story with honor and integrity adding value to all the other stories around us…then we will begin to find the true meaning of the abundant life.

Today live out your story untethered from the last chapter and unafraid of the next chapter. God’s story is always moving, choose to allow your part to be absorbed into the larger narrative at work. Two things will happen,

1. Your story will find more and more joy and purpose.
2. You will stop worrying about judging, and interfering with everyone else’s story.

This will free you to allow your life to affect others in a positive way that brings about transformation and God-centricity.

Okay, go write!

Monty

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Sunday Night quotes 4/15/2012-Story

Today I talked about changing the story that you find yourself in. Sometimes we spend years trying to get out of a story only to find that we were fighting against what our soul truly wanted. God often allows us to hit the wall as we try to change the storyline of life…sometimes we hit the same wall over and over…as we circle back again to familiar terrain, it’s time to look at the story differently…perhaps see what God is up to in the midst, and allow Him to craft the storyline with and for us…This week, here are some quotes on story for you to ruminate on! As I post tonight I am in Portland, very cool city, I wonder what story God might invite me into if I pay attention 🙂

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
~Maya Angelou

A boy’s story is the best that is ever told.
~Charles Dickens

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.
~George Eliot

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
~C. S. Lewis

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
~Orson Welles

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.
~Isak Dinesen

A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order.
~Jean-Luc Godard

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
~John Updike

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.
~James M. Barrie

Now you know the rest of the story.
~Paul Harvey

The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.
~Rumi

Christianity is the story of how the rightful King has landed, you might say in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in His great campaign of sabotage.
~C.S. Lewis

My friend invented Cliff’s Notes. When I asked him how he got such a great idea, he said, “Well, first I… I just… well, to make a long story short…”
~Steven Wright

The universe is made of stories, not atoms.
~Muriel Rukeyser, poet

Great Stories happen to those who can tell them.
~Ira Glass