Oh, The Stories We Will Tell
10/26/09
I am irrepressibly drawn to tales of unlikely success. Of course we all want the princess to escape the clutches of the evil dragon, but in fairy tales we expect the hero/heroine to come out ahead. They were destined for greatness, and that’s plain to everyone.
Real-life stories of nitty-gritty determination and eventual victory are the ones that feed my soul. The career trajectory of an individual such as Mary Kay Ash (Mary Kay Cosmetics) or a reformed prostitute-turned missionary like Mary Magdalene are given all the more gravity when their prior lives of desperation are taken into consideration.
Even when we hear accounts of others who have overcome incredible obstacles to obtain their trophies, we often fail to internalize the moral of the story. There must be something peculiarly great about these individuals that caused them to reach such grandeur from such depth. And we go on dismissing the merit in ourselves and in our fellow ordinary neighbors. We temper our dreams and call it reality because surely we, too, could not also be destined for greatness.
Having faced a particularly challenging year, lately I have found myself wondering what it would be like to write my memoir someday. (I have freshly added a twenty-sixth year to my time on earth, but I know I have awhile to go before full-fledged memoir is in order.) More specifically, I have been imagining myself in the future and what I would say about this time of particular struggle. Will I get my chance to say, “It was worth it”?
What chapter will this year of obstacle be in my own success story? Most importantly, will I stick around for the ending? Or will I believe the notion that greatness is meant for someone else and not for me?
This week I drove my friend to a film studio, to be recorded for a documentary on refugee resettlement in Tucson. He has only recently moved to the U.S. after being in a refugee camp in Nepal for nearly two decades. He is the same age as me and has endured an entire childhood, adolescence, and early family life waiting for hope to materialize. I can hardly imagine encapsulating the rigors of his life into a four-minute video shoot. When I asked him what his biggest hopes are for his family, he said it was first and foremost that his two-year-old daughter will become an educated woman and known for what she does. After all these tumultuous years of hardship, he never quit believing in greatness. Though he is educated, articulate, and incredibly capable, he is working multiple entry-level jobs so that he can provide for his family and eventually get a degree from a U.S. college. He holds his head high as he keeps the end in mind, because he knows that greatness is a choice. Significance lies within us and is not dependent on circumstances.
Paul urged Timothy to “fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you…” (I Timothy 1:6). Through the qualities imparted by our Creator, we are all powerful agents of change in our world. We don’t wait or hope for greatness. We only choose to recognize it inside of us already, to choose it when it’s difficult to believe in, and to fan it into flame so that the world may see and take note.
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