“We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
― Joan Didion
As a public health nurse, I live in a world of quantitative data and quantifiable results. Two times a year we must demonstrate to funding sources that our preventive health program works. We need to show that the money we spend translates into more women getting mammograms and pap tests, to more women and men getting colonoscopies. If the numbers don’t show it, it isn’t working.
But I’m a story-teller. I’m a person of stories living in a world of numbers. A person where time is of no importance while I listen or watch a story being told. I am a story-teller and lover of stories that works in a world that gives money to the efficient, that weighs and measures importance based on data driven by numbers.
Numbers mean little to me. Tell me a thousand have died and I will feel sad; tell me the story of one of those who died, tell me about the mother that hugged her child goodbye that morning only to find out by noon that she would never feel the warmth of that child’s body again and I will weep. Tell me the story of one little boy, whose body washed up on the shore of the sea, and I will act. The story helps me make sense of the numbers; the story makes the numbers real.
Stories move the heart to act. Stories cut across cultural divides. Stories connect us to each other. Stories help us to understand ourselves and others better. There’s a reason that Jesus told stories. He could talk all day long to hard-hearted humans and give them commandments and rules, but they would have dismissed him and gone on their way. Instead, he gave them stories. Stories of people like they were, stories that used the context of Middle Eastern village life, stories of shepherds and fields and Samaritans and Pharisees. And in the stories, they saw themselves.
So keep on telling stories – yours and those of others. And keep on listening to the stories of others – Because when we stop telling stories, we will stop being human.
“Storytelling, then—fictional or nonfictional, realistic or embellished with dragons—is a way of making sense of the world around us.”*
A life story is written in chalk, not ink, and it can be changed.*
*[Source: Story of My Life: How Narrative Creates Personality]
Marilyn R. Gardner 
My health record is like a diary of my life….a record of the wounds incurred in my wandering. Measles, mumps, fractured big toe, depression, bulimia, pregnancies, miscarriage, plantar fasciitis, bad knees. I am glad it does not record my real health problems of greed, selfishness, lust, fear, or complacency. Even so, I am marked, and those who read my history make assumptions. I cannot change what they think, but I know who I am. And I know Who God is. He has walked me through all the mud where I chose to wallow, and up the rocks that gave me a better view. I am not my story ; it talks about me, but that is not who I am. In Christ, I am who He declares me: a precious, powerful, princess. I am a survivor. So are you. We are defined by our strengths, not just our scars. Like an old gnarled tree that has torqued from swirling winds, and bent from pressing ice, been broken and bruised from clambering children,and has huddled in snow and stretched in sunshine, we still stand. We stand in strength. And God stands with us.
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Everybody has a story. There is much to learn from the stories of others. Before there were books, newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, movies, there were stories; verbal stories passed down from generation to generation. Some of the best never have nor will ever make the media. I want to hear some of those stories and I need to be a better listener.
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I could tell you the story of my mammogram! That’s a story that would reinforce your work…. It’s a story that starts the night before when we sat around telling stories about wringer wash machines. That’s not the best subject matter for a story before you enter the story of your first ever mammogram!
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My health record is like a diary of my life….a record of the wounds incurred in my wandering. Measles, mumps, fractured big toe, depression, bulimia, pregnancies, miscarriage, plantar fasciitis, bad knees. I am glad it does not record my real health problems of greed, selfishness, lust, fear, or complacency. Even so, I am marked, and those who read my history make assumptions. I cannot change what they think, but I know who I am. And I know Who God is. He has walked me through all the mud where I chose to wallow, and up the rocks that gave me a better view. I am not my story ; it talks about me, but that is not who I am. In Christ, I am who He declares me: a precious, powerful, princess. I am a survivor. So are you. We are defined by our strengths, not just our scars. Like an old gnarled tree that has torqued from swirling winds, and bent from pressing ice, been broken and bruised from clambering children,and has huddled in snow and stretched in sunshine, we still stand. We stand in strength. And God stands with us
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