the stories we tell

Humans define themselves by the stories they tell.

This notion has deeply affected the way I have processed my story and my faith. My parents got divorced the year I turned twenty-two, which also happened to be the year Liz and I got married. I of course knew before this that they weren't in a great spot in their marriage.

In those pre-divorce years, my parents relationship and my Dad's relationship with God became a centerpiece of my prayers and my "relationship with God." I was living in a story in which one of *God's* priorities was that my parents would get back together and have a thriving, loving, God-centered marriage. Longing and waiting for this became a part of my own story, fueled by an eschatology depicted with marriage imagery, i.e., the Bible talks about the people of God as "the bride of Christ" and the eschatalogical New Jerusalem is described as a bride. There was some connection there in my brain in which the story I was telling about my own life was wrapped up in the story I had given about the cosmos.

The way this all affected me uniquely as an Enneagram Nine was that my parent's relationship, which very primal and rooted in my early life, was a sort of representation of my internal peace. And peace with self and the world is the primary need for Type Nine.

There's a lot to unpack here, so thankfully writing is cheaper than therapy.

When my parents got divorced I had to give up the story that I thought I was living in. 

Now, I don't look back on this event as a trial that I had to live through. I learned a lot, but I don't think I learned anything that young Evangelical me would have expected someone in my situation to learn from it. That is, I didn't develop a renewed sense of connection to God or understanding of suffering or anything. It was just a shitty thing that happened.

When I began to truly give up that story--the one about my parents--the cosmic story started to unravel. I do not mean that I connected "my parent's couldn't stay married" to "God isn't real." But the whole thing--the Bible, the structure, the dogma (even the progressive dogma that embrace doubt)--began to feel like a story I was clinging to in order to have a center and to keep going. There might not be anything wrong with having a story like that. I'm currently just not sure what that is for me. But even acknowledging the power of narratives that shape human life and culture, in a real sense for me it all became just a story.