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The Mother’s Day Gift She’s Sure to Love

by | May 4, 2021 | Mother's Day, Weekly Gospel Meditation, Writing

The Mother’s Day Gift She’s Sure to Love

Her children rise up and call her blessed. Proverbs 31:28

I’ll be honest. I’m not really looking forward to this Mother’s Day. It will be the first since my mom died. I didn’t always do a good job of celebrating her. Life got busy, and of course I had my own Mother’s Day to celebrate with my kids. It was also hard to come up with a gift. Especially in the latter years of her life, she insisted that she didn’t want any more “stuff,” so it was hard  to find something she would want. She also didn’t enjoy going out to eat as much as she once had, so I couldn’t take her to lunch. The last few years I usually just settled on a scarf or some earrings and a handmade card. When I was going through her “stuff” after she died, I was surprised to see how many of my Mother’s Day and other cards she had saved. I don’t know why I was surprised. I usually save all the cards my kids send me. There is something about a kid (even, or especially, an adult kid) taking the time to write things down.

All of this leads me to this guide to writing a thank-you letter to your mom. I know, buying a card and signing it is easier. Sending a handprint of your preschooler is easier. Writing a thank-you letter is hard, because we have to stop and think about our mother’s life and how it has shaped us. We have to try to put words to thoughts that are hard to articulate.

It’s even harder if you lost your mother early in life or if your mother wasn’t much of a mother to you. Maybe you would like to consider writing a thank-you letter to someone who has mothered you well. I pray there’s someone in your life like that. It may even be a friend around your same age. Some of you, like me, may have lost your mother recently. I plan to do this exercise in remembrance. I believe it will help me as I grieve. Maybe it would help you too.

Life is short, and words are meaningful. Let’s take the time to write them down and give them to our moms.

To get you started, I’ve provided a few prompts and tips for writing.

Prompts:

Tell her something you love about her…

Her cooking, her sense of humor, her wits, the way she provided for you and your family

Tell her a way she’s really helped you…

Always being there when you call or text

Bringing your lunch to school when you forgot it

Taking care of your kids so you could get some time away

Tell her about a characteristic or practice she has that you’d like to develop…

Her kindness, faithfulness, boldness

Her discipline in reading the Bible, her commitment to exercise, her love of prayer

Tell her about lasting impact she’s made…

on the world, on you, on your family, on your friends, on her work.

Think about things she’s really good at…

things she says a lot (even if you got tired of hearing it),

things she loves…

Tips for Writing Your Letter

  1. Pray about it. Ask God to help your memory and your imagination. Ask the Holy Spirit to give you the right words.
  2. Brainstorm…Set a timer for 15 minutes and get all your ideas down on paper or into the voice recorder on your phone. Talk to your siblings or your dad if you get stuck. Try to come up with as many specific examples of things your mom has done for you as you can.
  3. Write a rough draft. Set a timer for 15 minutes and just start writing. You can always change things later.
  4. Don’t worry about having the right grammar or the best words.
  5. Do try to be specific…remember to try to “show” rather than “tell”:

If you do this exercise, I’d love to hear about it. Comment below or shoot me an email here.

Why Telling Your Story Matters: Thoughts from Daniel Taylor

by | Jun 9, 2020 | Books, Writing

Why Telling Your Story Matters: Thoughts from Daniel Taylor

If you’ve been watching my YouTube Live Series on Story Feasting, you’ll know I think your story matters. Today, I’m sharing some thoughts from one of my favorite authors on story: Dr. Daniel Taylor. Read on to learn why you should share your stories, how you were born to tell stories, and how to get over the fear of writing down stories.

Daniel Taylor on Storytelling

In his book, Creating a Spiritual Legacy, Daniel Taylor, a wise man and scholar of story,  cheers on ‘every woman/man’ to “just do it,” get out there and tell a story. Not only does he encourage us; he actually shows us how to write our stories with some specific, short exercises. He includes stories from a broad spectrum of folks, old and young, to show us that leaving legacies is for everyone. Here’s a brief quote addressing the question, “why story?”.

Why storytelling matters

“Stories are, among other things, organisms for storing and preserving a life. But they do not do so in a static, mothballed way. Stories do not preserve our lives in the same way that mummification preserves a body or quite in the way that a battery preserves a charge. Rather, stories preserve a life in the way a plant preserves the sun. They absorb and embody the energy and dynamism of a life as a tree ties up the energy of the sun in its limbs, ready to be released again should someone strike a match.” Daniel Taylor, Creating a Spiritual Legacy

How you were born to tell stories:

“Everyone, I have claimed, has the ability to tell a story, and particularly a story from their own life. You do not have to be taught how to tell a story, or need “five secrets to good storytelling ” articles, or advice from people like me. Telling stories is as natural as breathing, and you have been doing it since before you could talk (pointing and crying and making faces being among our first storytelling strategies).” Daniel Taylor, Creating a Spiritual Legacy

Why you should write your stories down

To persuade us to write these stories down so that they may remain as a legacy, Taylor offers much-needed reality checks:

“We have this deep-seated misconception that anyone can talk but only writers can write – as though putting our story on paper puts us in competition with Tolstoi. Let it go. You’re not competing with Tolstoi. You’re competing with oblivion, which is what you’ll have if you don’t pass on your stories. Any story, whether beautifully or primitively written, is a strike against being forgotten.” Daniel Taylor, Creating a Spiritual Legacy

Check out this book and Daniel Taylor’s other excellent book on sharing story, Tell Me a Story. In both, you will find motivation as well as helpful instructions for writing down your stories. Making lists of stories and characters, organizing around scenes, and telling the truth are just a few of the many excellent suggestions he offers. Write a story. Leave a legacy.

And if you’ve always wanted to share your story, especially to write it down, but don’t know where to start, consider working with me as your coach. Sometimes it takes another person to spur you through the hard parts of getting that story down. 

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Part 2: How to Overcome 5 Common Fears of Sharing Your Story

by | Jun 11, 2019 | Learning Story

Part 2: How to Overcome 5 Common Fears of Sharing Your Story

Are you afraid to share your story? Today we look at three more common reasons for not sharing stories and some stories that encourage us to overcome those fears: 

  1. It’s not godly enough.

Thirty-five-year-old Lucy actually spoke these words as she began her story of a secret summer boyfriend: “This isn’t a very godly story.” Indeed, it might have seemed so at first as she described sneaking out of her house at fifteen to meet her first love at midnight in the neighborhood park in the days when parks at midnight weren’t so scary. It might still have seemed ungodly as she described how when the summer ended, and she and her secret boyfriend returned to school, he pretended not to know her because she was a band-nerd and he was a basketball jock. And yet, as her tears of brutal betrayal leaked out, how many of us recognized similar betrayals? How many of us noticed that God had actually saved us from cruel men who would use us and betray us?

Many times, all we have to do is look a little deeper, listen a little harder, to find God’s mercy at work in any story we might tell.

  1. I don’t have any interesting stories.

When she passed on her turn to tell her story, sixty-two-year-old Eunice spoke these very words. The leader nodded wisely and asked, “Eunice, did you say you grew up on a dairy farm?”

“Yes,” Eunice replied, smiling, “I remember the summer I was seven I had to start getting up early with my older sister to learn how to milk the cows. We used to spray each other with the milk sometimes.” And then she giggled a little as she remembered. Her face softened, and the mischievous grin of seven-year-old Eunice was revealed to us for a quick moment.

No interesting stories indeed. Eunice, created in the image of God, growing up on a dairy farm, spraying her older sister with the cow’s milk…Forgive my irony, but need I say more?

  1. I’m afraid of what people will think of me.

She was a sinner, and everyone in the group knew it. They knew she had been married multiple times and that the last man she lived with was not her husband. They even wondered a little that she dared to show up. But then, Shalona began her story. She told of being abused by her father and marrying the first man who said that he loved her. She told how that man had quickly turned on her, calling her lazy and worthless. She told of how she met another man who seemed much kinder and married him. On and on her story of “looking for love in all the wrong places” went until she reached the turning point, the day she met a truly different kind of man. This man knew everything about her. And he loved her. He didn’t try to use her or marry her or have sex with her. He just wanted to give her a gift of love that would never end.  “Living water,” Shalona said. “He called it ‘living water’.” And ever since that day, she had told anyone who would listen this amazing story of the man who loved her well.

You may recognize this storyteller as the woman at the well from John 4 (And yes, I invented the name “Shalona” as a play on “shalom,” the deep peace that God brings). She is the woman who once shirked in the shadows because she feared being shamed by others. She is the woman whose life was so radically changed by Jesus that she ran to tell others, “Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did.”

Yes, it is scary to think what people may think of us if they know our whole story, the story of our sin. But we must ask this one crucial question: “What if, in telling that story, we can lead someone to see the Jesus who came to redeem and change sinners just like us? Is it worth the risk?” I hope you find that it is.

Photo by Sarah Noltner on Unsplash

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Memorial Day: A Soldier’s Story of Joy and Sorrow

by | May 27, 2019 | Memorial Day, Seasons & Holidays

Memorial Day: A Soldier’s Story of Joy and Sorrow

Remembering a Soldier’s Story

Today, Memorial Day, we celebrate and remember those who have died to defend our nation’s freedom. Although he did not die in defending our nation’s freedom, my grandfather, a soldier who served on a battleship before and during World War II, lost much to the war. A few years ago, my dad handed me an apple box spilling over with yellowed black and white photographs. 

“I figured you would want to know some of your grandfather’s story,” he said gruffly. You bet this story girl did want to know.

Since my granddaddy died when I was seven, I had not known him very well. I had asked my Dad about my grandfather, but most of his stories centered around battleships and World War II, not on who my grandfather was. As I leafed through the memorabilia my grandfather had collected as a young man as well as some my grandmother had added to the collection, , I learned bits of one sailor’s story, a complex tale of adventure and ambiguity. I understood my grandfather’s story better, my father’s story better, and the stories of our current soldiers and families who sacrifice to protect our nation’s freedom. Our heroes’ lives may be laced with suffering, but they are also plentiful with redemption.

From Alabama to Australia

My granddaddy grew up in Abbeville, Alabama on an old homestead. My granddaddy’s father made his money in timber but was remembered most by my dad for his remarkable capacity to sit on the porch and drink “liquid fire”. My granddaddy, whose given name was “Charley Jack Reynolds,” like many young men of that time, decided at seventeen years old to run away and see the world as a sailor in the U.S. Navy. He was good with his hands, so he became a machinist.

In the boxes, I found photo albums filled with postcards my granddaddy presumably purchased in places almost as far away from Alabama as he could be, most notably the Pacific. “Natives in Samoa” reads the caption on one; “Pre-Luau” and “Post-Luau” reads another. The Melbourne Art Museum; vast, prickly pineapple fields in Hawaii; and locks surrounding the Panama Canal tell the story of a young sailor who took in culture and keenly observed history even as he made it.

A Love Story and the Next Generation

At home on leave, my granddaddy, upon seeing his future wife acting in a play, famously vowed, “I’m going to marry that girl someday.”  A smart and perky young woman from a family that had lost everything, she worked her way through school and graduated valedictorian from Newton Normal School in Newton, Alabama. She went on to Howard College (now Samford University—she would be thrilled to know her great-grandson graduated from there!), where she trained to be a teacher.

Lala and Charley Jack had one son, my Dad, who was named Robert, after his grandfather. My Dad was given the middle name Charles—after my granddaddy, whose name my grandmother had apparently converted from “Charley Jack” to “Charles Jackson,” a more educated sounding name, a name that might suit a sailor rising in the naval ranks. (I still remember addressing letters to them as “Mr. and Mrs. Charles Jackson Reynolds,” until one day my Dad suggested that “C.J.” would be more accurate).

Happy Times and Sad

From the photos you can see that they enjoyed seasons as a happy family. There were times when both my Grandfather and my Dad smiled when their pictures were taken.

But there were also the days following Pearl Harbor when my grandmother and my father waited in darkness, huddled by a gas stove, fearing that the Japanese would bomb the base where they lived in San Pedro. In those days, naval officers came and went to neighbors’ homes, delivering dreaded news of husbands and fathers killed in the attack. After eleven days of waiting, the card arrived, carried by a mailman. The card was cryptic; the photo says it better than I could:

My granddaddy had been on a supplier ship stationed in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. As my dad puts it, he had a “ringside seat.” Apparently, his ship sailed quickly after the attack. Just around Christmas that year, my granddaddy finally made it home for a couple of days, bringing with him a gift his buddies had purchased for my dad, who was seven at the time—a Red Ryder BB Gun. That’s what my dad remembers about Pearl Harbor. Apparently, my grandfather never spoke about it much. Apparently, he smiled less often after that.

A diabetic, my granddaddy retired in Pensacola, and my grandmother continued teaching. One day, at the relatively young age of seventy-one, as he was tending his rosebush in the back yard, he was struck down quickly by a heart attack. In a small box I found his death certificate, a list of funeral attendees, the legal announcement in the paper regarding the estate of “Charley Jack Reynolds, a.k.a, Charley J. Reynolds,” and a formal business card with the name, Charles Jackson Reynolds, Lieutenant, United States Navy. Like many soldiers, he had many names to go along with his many stories.

A Good Read for Hard Times: The Waiting Room Devotional

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2 Unfinished Stories and a Skywriting God

by | Oct 18, 2016 | Learning Story

2 Unfinished Stories and a Skywriting God

Unfinished Stories and Skywritten Messages

Living Story was founded because I believe that the stories of our lives aren’t just random occurrences but rather messages of grace from the God who created and loves us and continues to write his love into our lives.

Some days offer up unfinished stories, puzzling stories, stories that leave you wanting more. It’s like God is skywriting a message, and you’re watching little puffs of smoke forming letters but you can’t quite make them out yet.

An Unfinished Story about an Irreligious Corrections Officer

Yesterday was such a day for me. I’m going to tell you two stories that I do not completely understand. Two stories that don’t have endings. Two stories that look a lot like a jet letter fading fast into the cloudless blue sky. I hope they make you think about, even write, some of your own stories. And wonder about the God who is really and truly writing redemption stories in this world.

The officer had a round, tanned face. He held a paper plate loaded with large mounds of Sonny’s barbecued beef, a smaller round of coleslaw, and a slew of baked beans. As he placed 2 large Sam’s Club chocolate chunk cookies on a napkin, he looked at us and spoke quietly, almost shyly,

“I am not religious. But I want to thank you for the work you do. These people really need to know that there’s something…something… more.”

“I am not religious. But I want to thank you for the work you do. These people really need to know that there’s something more.” #prisonministry Click To Tweet

He turned to walk out of the small conference room where we had laid our small feast for the Work-Release Staff Appreciation lunch.

Before he got out the door, I managed to corral a few of the words flying around in my head, “Thank YOU for what you do. Your attitude …I’m sure…is a great support to …those you serve.”

Later, as my teammate and I were leaving, we revisited that story.

I spoke first. In my typically frustrated- I-wanta-fight way, I insisted, “But that’s ILLOGICAL!” I wanted to go out and grab him and sit him down and say, “But that doesn’t make sense. How can you want “religion” for the inmates, and not believe it’s important for yourself?” (I am assuming by “religion” he means something along the lines of “faith and hope in a being beyond.”)

My teammate had a kinder, gentler approach. She wanted to sit him down and ask, (I imagine in a firm motherly tone), “You clearly have such compassion for the inmates. Where do you suppose that compassion comes from?”

Either way. That’s it. That’s the end of the story. It is a conundrum. It is a puzzle. I may never know the answer.

Except, that’s not completely true. I may get to know it someday. Because last night when we returned to the facility to lead our weekly Bible study, we saw the officer again. He turned as he was walking down the hall and said, “Thank you again for the lunch.”

Still shaking my head. Still wondering what God is up to there. Still wanting to tell him what he said makes no sense.

There’s another story that I’d like to know more about. Perhaps it is connected, perhaps not. Well, it’s connected. If only in the sense that it occurred at the same place, this place that compels me these days.

An Unfinished Story about A Basically Selfish Woman and a Hungry Woman

My teammate had arrived way early for the evening Bible study. We sat chatting in my car outside the work-release facility. It was dark, and we knew we weren’t in the safest of surroundings, so when I noticed a figure standing outside my window, waving at me, I was startled at first.

I turned to see a petite woman of probably around 40, street dirt covering her well-worn jeans and t-shirt. I opened my door and stepped out of my car.

The first thing she said to me was, “Wow, you’re a – giant!” (I am only 5’9, but I was wearing my Dansko’s, and I did tower over this woman who stood probably around 5 feet).

I smiled at the observation, looked down at my shoes, and smiled, “Yeah, I guess I am kind of tall!”

An anxious look passed her face, and she quickly asked, “Can you help me?”

I am not sure why I said this, except that it kind of makes sense. I said, “Are you hungry?”

She answered eagerly, “YES. Food would be great.”

Honestly, I couldn’t believe my good fortune. Because I hate giving out money to street people who ask. AND because I had recently read a book by Brené Brown in which she wrote about keeping protein bars and Gatorade in her vehicle for such moments as these. About six months ago, I had stocked my car with both.

The Real Story

Now before you see me as the great white hero riding around town handing out Gatorade and Cliff bars to homeless people, you should know that I haven’t. Handed out any. When I pass by the sun-toasted woman who frequently stands with a cardboard sign at the Target exit, I never stop to hand her a Gatorade or a Cliff bar, EVEN. THOUGH. I HAVE THEM IN MY CAR.

And the real truth is that I drank all the Gatorades. I got thirsty this summer, so I drank them. And ate a few of the Cliff bars.

So last night, when the woman said food would be great, at first I did feel a bit like a hero as I raised the rear hatch of my car and pulled out a box with two Cliff bars in it. I handed it to her and she said thank you and walked on.

My teammate thought that was the coolest thing. But it was so little. And it was enough. I guess. I don’t know.

As we walked into the work-release center, I spied the woman across the four-lane road walking near the Waffle House. I kind of wished I could go over there and ask her if I could take her for a meal. I wanted to know who had done the gorgeous corn-rows in her hair.

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