Can We Edit Our Stories?

About a month before I met Dan, I came across a quote from Susan Statham:

“Your life is a story. Write well. Edit often.”

It caused me to wonder how the editing process works.

The key, I think, is to consider all the hard and holy moments from God’s perspective. Paul addressed this in a letter to believers in the ancient city of Philippi:

“Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” — Philippians 4:8

This word think can be translated as, “to take an inventory, conclude, reason, think (on).” 

We edit the adverse events in our lives by taking inventory of all that has transpired. By choosing to see our hard places through God’s lenses as we look for the true and lovely and admirable that accompany the heart-breaking. We edit by writing out our reasoned thoughts.

Dr. Timothy Wilson—a psychology professor and lead author of a Duke study on the benefits of capturing our reflections in writing—said this:

“Writing forces people to reconstrue whatever is troubling them and find new meaning in it.”

Reconstrue. Rethink. Reinterpret.

There’s a long chapter in my earlier story that was a bleak trek through job loss, financial reversals, a live-in parent sinking into Alzheimer’s, cancer, and eventually widowhood.

But I edited that chapter. Instead of those years representing irretrievable loss, they signify a season of stretching and growth, of falling more deeply into my faith, into more desperate dependency upon God.

Henri Nouwen penned these thought-provoking words:

“Our pains and joys, our feelings of grief and satisfaction, are not simply dependent on the events of our lives, but also, and even more so, on the ways we remember these events.” 

Dan and I didn’t have a choice when cancer invaded our spouses’ bodies, our homes, our normal routines.  

But we had a choice in how we reacted and lived forward with those irreversible things.

God is a best-selling author and master storyteller. And He wrote a beautiful book about each of us. Quite possibly there are some chapters you wouldn’t have written into your book. But with open and trusting hearts, can we say to our Creator, “Help yourself to my story”?

Back then, sometime during that month before I met Dan, I wrote:

Now that I’m in a blissful, contented, brimming widowhood routine, I wouldn’t wonder if it’s time for some unsettling. Because getting pushed out of our comfortable places provides the opportunity to start the next chapter of our lives.

But what if that chapter doesn’t turn out exactly as we planned? It won’t.

What if we could edit and reframe it from God’s perspective? We can.

I can just hear God saying: ‘Be prepared for unsettledness ahead. Hold on for the ride. It’s going to get wild and fun and unnerving and surprising and scary and disruptive and astonishing.’

I’m ready. Let’s do this.

And then I met Dan.