My Why

In 2013 I experienced two life-impacting events within two weeks.

First was a trip to Haiti with Cross International to meet the missionaries and children our radio station and our listeners supported. It is hard to describe how difficult life is in that ravaged country.

From Port Au Prince, I flew to Miami, then on to Nashville where I met Nick and a couple hundred other people for two days of a conference called Storyline. I really did want to find God's subplot for my story. And I don't think it was coincidental that my route there included a few days in Haiti.

The Storyline conference was fantastic, and I took pages and pages of notes. On the last day, Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz and the host of the conference, posed a question I had never considered.

“Why do you think you are on the planet?” he asked. “What did God create you to do? Not some generic 'to love everybody and serve Him' kind of answer but what specifically did He create you for?”

Miller said we were going to take a break, and he wanted us to take our notebooks and find a bench or a tree on campus, sit down and think about it, and try and come up with three specific answers to that question.

As everybody got up to leave the auditorium, I grabbed my notebook and a pen and immediately wrote down:

1. To tell stories

2. To connect people to Jesus and each other

3. To help the disadvantaged

I usually struggle with this kind of assignment. But somehow those three things flowed from my pen like I had been planning to answer the question for a week. I felt like a lot of unexplained things in my life were starting to fit together. I just had no idea what that would look like.

Donald Miller also taught me something really important during one of his talks at Storyline. In fact, it's the basis behind the name of the conference itself. He suggested we are all characters in a story that we are writing. We have some say in that story. We don't just bounce around like a pinball in a machine full of clappers.

Miller asked us to take a piece of paper and draw a horizontal line on it. Then we were to plot out significant moments in our life, from earliest memory through today. It was kind of like a life-review of our story so far. Events that were negative were to go under the horizontal line and events that were positive went above it.

He used Joseph from the Bible as an example. (You can, and should, read the account of Joseph in Genesis 37.) He was the most loved son of Jacob...that's positive. His brothers were jealous and sold him into slavery...that's negative. Potiphar's wife...negative. Prison...negative. He interpreted a dream and saved Egypt from famine...positive. He reunited with his brothers...positive.

I started writing life events on my paper, some above and some below the line. As I got closer to present-day events, I realized I was writing almost everything above the line. Then Miller asked the most important question of the week: “What positive life events have happened in your life that would NOT have happened without the negative events preceding them?”

Joseph famously said in Genesis 50:20 “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” (NIV)

I looked at my paper and considered that almost everything that God was allowing me to do would not have happened without the negative stuff I went through. Unlike Joseph, much of mine was self-inflicted, but God still used it for good!

I felt an overwhelming sense of grace. I realized it was ok to remember the bad things, the mistakes, the willful sin, the dark days...not to dwell on them, not to beat myself up, but to recognize that God can use it all. That He can redeem it.

The divorce. The depression. The isolation. All part of my story, but just chapters that lead the protagonist to better days.

Life isn't a screenplay. There aren't always neat and tidy happy endings. But it was very enlightening to stop and look at my life as a story, with me as the lead character. A friend of mine says he finds it helpful sometimes to think of himself in the third person when he is struggling with something and say, “Why is Michael having a hard time finishing this project?” It gives him fresh perspective and temporarily removes emotion and politics and bias from the situation, so he can look at the problem objectively. If you find yourself able to give friends wise advice but struggle with your own decisions, you should try that.

That's kind of what Storyline did for me. I saw my story from a much bigger perspective. And I realized I wasn't done writing my story.

Discovering and writing down my why gave me a wonderful filter with which I could run almost all my life decisions through.

Does it connect people to Jesus and each other? Does it help the disadvantaged? Does it give me the opportunity to tell my story?

If yes…let’s do it. If no…then probably I will take a gentle pass.

Draw your own storyline. Reflect on where you are, and how you got there. And then ask God to show you why you are on this planet specifically.

If you feel free to do so, I would love to read your answers below.