Living a Better Story

The September after I turned fifteen years old, my mother taught a creative thinking workshop. I thought I didn't remember much about the workshop when I first sat down here. But as my mind went back, I began to mine up details I should have forgotten long ago.

I remember my shape was a triangle. My color was pink. I described myself as one thousand years old. I stayed up all night long to write a piece of poetry my friend Sarah would dance to as I read aloud. I remember it rained the night before. I remember one assignment was to write about one of my ambitions.

What did I want to do with my life?

I wanted to open a youth center. Specifically, a safe place for inner city kids to come. Laundry facilities, cafeterias, basketball courts, music venues. We'd have church there on Sundays, I imagined. But even at fifteen, I was incredibly adamant about Jesus' love transcending through every day of the week. I knew "church" on Sundays is not what changes people's lives.

Over the next few years the dream would swirl around in the forefront of my mind, eventually settle in a corner, and begin to collect dust.

It was still there.

But I wasn't acknowledging it.

I started college when I was seventeen. I can't even remember what I thought I was going to school for back then. But I do know I went through a few different majors, but could never find a good fit. School was only a formality. I had no goal and no real passion for anything I was doing.

When I was nineteen, I met someone who taught me how to love people. A love that made lives intertwine, provided for needs, comforted the hurting, acknowledged the ignored.

This felt more like a move in the right direction than anything had before.

I remember holding my breath through Anatomy and Physiology class. Crying my way through consumer math. BSing my way through biology. I thought I wanted to be a nurse. Or an occupational therapist. As much as I loved people, I thought I didn't want to work with little kids. I thought I didn't want to live in the ghetto. I thought I would never live overseas.

In the spring of 2009, I took my first social work class.

The idea, which had been resting patiently in the corner of my conscious, began to stir. Stretching tight muscles and blinking sleep eyes, the idea awoke and began to demand my attention.

In the summer of 2009, I read A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. I also did a Bible study on risking taking and discernment of the Holy Spirit. The combination of those three things, and my own restlessness, propelled me forward into a season of divine discomfort and yearning.

I wanted to do something. I wanted to be someone. My language changed and I began to talk and pray about living a better story.

Last summer was also the summer I got sick. We still don't know what was wrong... but the ominous word cancer kept floating around and bumping into my conversations. I was uninsured, miserably sick, and determined, whatever the outcome, to live well.

$3,000 worth of medical bills later, I dropped out of school. Classes would have to wait until I could get my debt paid off. This sudden hiccup in the plan only spurred the restlessness I had been feeling for months.

Restlessness is what motivates me. When I get uncomfortable in my own skin, when I don't know where home is, when I start to itch I know it's time for something to change. So I started praying.

I heard God tell me to get my passport.

I applied for a passport, got eight different shots, bought bug spray, and hopped on a plane to East Africa.

Ethiopia.

Then Restlessness threw deuces up and went home after I landed in Addis Ababa.

I was living a better story. I suddenly found myself in the very throes of character building and plot thickening and dramatic scenery (there were monkeys too... I've come to the conclusion that if your story includes exotic animals, it has great potential).

Africa changed everything.

Africa wrecked me.

I came home and cried myself to sleep under a homemade blanket, which smelled like the postal shops of Addis.

Transition is one of the trickiest parts of a story.

In March of 2010 I came home from Africa finding myself changed and the rest of my world strangely and frustratingly the same. But Frustration, like Restlessness, usually pushes (shoves?) me in the direction I need to go.

Which was how one cool night at the end of March I found myself standing in one particular front yard.

Some friends of mine started a ministry last fall - a real grassroots effort. They adopted the east end of Lexington, which backs up to the free clinic Southland runs. And by adopted I mean, they bring people groceries. Give people beds. Know their names and their stories and when their birthdays are.

I was skeptical for the first seven months of the ministry. Praying for them, but harboring cynicism. Diligently ignoring all the emails and all the requests for my participation.

But things change.

I changed.

And there I was. On East Second Street, in the dark front yard of a crooked shot gun house, watching my friends load a new dryer onto the front porch. It had not been, by definition, a special night. But God had spoken to me. Stirred something deep in my belly, reminding me of my dream. Reminding me of who He made me to be...

Or perhaps telling me for the first time.

As my mind played with the idea, turning it over and over and finding it strangely familiar, I began to hear the sound of children. Running and screaming, they burst through the front screen door (which was missing its screen). Before I really knew what was happening, I was holding a little boy in my arms.

He was laughing hysterically, after launching himself off the porch and bravely flying in my unprepared arms. He told me his name and said he was seventy-two years old. I told him seventy-two years old didn't get to be held like little kids. He shook his head, adamantly reassuring me he was in fact, only six.

While he talked to me, he played with my hair.

Just a few moments later I was ushered into the house. "Here," a teenage girl said to me.

She handed me a baby.

So there I was, standing in a stranger's house, with pit bulls scratching at the bedroom door behind me, holding a teenage girl's three week old baby; happier than a clam.

Five months later, I now help lead this ministry. I am in charge of new volunteers (as this grassroots effort now serves over 50 homes in the east end and has about sixty volunteers show up every Tuesday night). My job is to make sure none of them end up going in a house alone... I don't tell them that's how I got here.

On Friday nights, a small group of us meet down at the medical clinic. Inspired by an elementary-school-age girl who wanted help making a Mother's Day gift, about fifteen volunteers and twice as many children show up for what we have come to call "Kids Club". We feed the children and play games; we have taught Bible stories and taught the boys not to hit the girls. We have plans for tutoring this school year and we have our hopeful eye on an abandoned community center down the street, which has basketball courts and laundry facilities...

We are called to live a better story with our lives. That's the key word here, I think. Better. Continuous. Growing. Progressive.

You see, I'm restless again. I start college back next week; finally, after paying off all that medical debt I am going back to finish my BASW. Facing financial challenges and schedule conflicts and a quiet, but strong, desire to return to Africa... I'm looking ahead.

I want to break cycles of poverty and abuse. I want to have to go to so many highschool graduations I can't keep track; I want to watch these children (I've come to love them like they're my own) become athletes and artists and businesswomen and fathers. I want to watch them live excellent lives. I want to help them overcome conflict. I want to introduce them to Jesus. Living a better story with my life means helping others lives better stories with theirs.

I think, perhaps, the next step in living a better story with my own life is to understand potential. As intuitive and perceptive as I can be, I often fail to remember just because I can't do something now doesn't mean I never can. Especially because I thought I didn't want to work with little kids. I thought I didn't want to live in the ghetto. I thought I would never live overseas.

I changed.

And I need to be bold.

With my life, I want to tell you a story about risk and adventure and conflict and triumph.

http://donmilleris.com/conference/

Living a Better Story Seminar from All Things Converge Podcast on Vimeo.