The Story That Grabs You at 2 AM

Sometimes in the stillness there's peace, but sometimes in the stillness our brains don't settle.

Sometimes at two o'clock in the morning I wake up and my brain's not calm.

It's stuck in a loop.

In a story.

And the story says, and the story says.

And it doesn't matter what else is going on, it's like that story.

Someone said the other day, it's my reality.

I can't break myself out of it.

It's a story that says, and this is my story, and I understand where it comes from.

It says, you have to take care of yourself.

No one else will.

That story doesn't care about the facts, it doesn't care about reality, it doesn't care about anything else around me.

It's locked.

What's a story that goes through your mind at the metaphoric two o'clock in the morning?

Is it a story that says you have to take care of yourself like mine or in the other side?

It says you're gonna be abandoned.

You're gonna be all alone.

Is it a story that says there the world is such that you have no power and you're always gonna get beat down?

What does your story tell you?

It's sober when we're sitting here looking back at our stories because we can see it a little bit, can't we?

Although maybe we're stuck in it right now, too.

But when you look back now, you look in it, you're like, oh wow, why do I keep getting stuck that way?

Why do I get stuck in that story?

Because our minds are story-making machines.

You give a mind any pieces of data, it will come up with a story, and often that story helped you in that moment, and now, however long after, it doesn't help you.

What does your story tell you to do?

Can you throw up the relational development model for me, Esmond?

When I'm in my story, that thing dra that story drives me all the way down into that I, right in the bottom corner.

It villainizes everything else in my life.

They, bad.

They will hurt me, bad.

If you're a people, please, if you're on the other side of the attachment thing, you'll go to they.

You'll suppress your I.

I is bad.

I can't show up that way.

I can't be who I am.

I have to be what they need me to be.

What does the story tell you you need to do?

Become someone you're different that you're not?

To isolate?

To attack?

Those 2 AM stories, man.

They're tough.

I'm fifty-four and that story is still there.

I read a book a number of years ago.

The thesis of the book said, Yes, you have stories, but you can change your story.

You can change to a healthier story, and I was like, huh, what?

That two o'clock voice, that thing, I can change that.

I am in.

Wouldn't that be nice?

That freedom from that story?

The only thing that and you know it's a good book when it says, Oh, by the way, to do this, you're going to have to do something you don't want to do.

Anytime that they give me a magic solution, though, they're like, just say this one line and everything will be fine.

I'm like, okay, that's BS.

This one says, you're going to have to accept something that you don't want to accept.

And not just a little bit, not like, you know, someone says something and you're like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree with that.

No, no.

In the depths of your bones.

The author uses the story of Jesus.

Jesus at the end of his life.

He's hanging on a cross.

The powers that be at that time, whenever you went against them, it seems what they did is they would crucify you.

We don't know a ton about crucification, but we know a few things.

One, nails were used.

Two, normally they let the body die on the cross, and it took a while.

And then they left the body there for a while after to say, Cross us, and this is your fate.

The sign above Jesus' head said, King of the Jews, which basically meant political insurrectionist.

And so Jesus is on the cross.

He's been beaten.

His life is hell.

And everything that he thinks that's going on in his life doesn't seem to be working.

He seems to have a story in his mind.

And we know the story because of what he says.

The story seems to be he has a story of God.

And again, remember, we've talked about personal stories.

We've talked about the stories of traditions.

I grew up in a Christian tradition that was Mennonite.

There was a whole story.

We were talking about the other day.

They were so against alcohol.

I don't know why, but their story said, like, alcohol will kill everything.

We have stories, our traditions have stories.

Jesus has a story that says, I will be saved from this fate.

He had a story of God that said, God will come down and save me from this moment, this death, this horrific ending to my life.

And something, I don't know why.

But also there's a realization that that story isn't true.

And Jesus says the line that I'm not sure that many people's stories can encompass.

He says, My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

His story of God breaks.

And the the biblical authors, they could have just not put this into the like the Gospels are not diaries of history where you can't leave things out.

No, they pick and choose all the time.

But they deliberately wrote that line.

They captured that line in the story, a line that seems to me to say, whatever story I held broke.

Most tradition stories will say, Oh, that's not what he meant.

It's a pun, it's a joke, euphemism, whatever word we're going to use to try and not make it real.

And the author of the book that I read said, no, no, no, that moment right there, that moment is the most profound spiritual moment that anyone can ever go through.

The moment when you realized the story I held can't coexist with something I'm experiencing.

That experience can break the story.

But that experience is some of the most painful things we've ever gone through, isn't it?

Question.

In the stories of your life, what are the things that broke?

What are the things that don't fit the story?

Every time my brain says, no one takes care of me, I think of things that my wife does for me.

She did something beautiful just the other day.

It's personal, it's between her and I.

I don't want to talk about it, but it was beautiful.

But it doesn't fit my story.

At two o'clock in the morning, my brain's going, no, that, no, no, that's not what happened.

That's not what she did.

That's not, no.

Because if I embrace that, the story starts to fall apart.

A friend of mine said someone sent her flowers the other day.

Said, you're beautiful.

She's like, no, that doesn't fit my story.

They had to do it.

They're my friend, right?

Oh, you're my spouse.

You have to do, oh, that's not what they meant.

Oh, they're just you being nice.

Isn't that a way to take the thing that doesn't fit your story and deny it?

And yet our tradition took the very thing that broke the story of Jesus' conception of God and said, no, no, no, we're going to write that down and keep it.

Because that's the moment something broke.

Now, here's the thing.

If we don't hold on to the thing that broke the story or breaks the story, we are resigned often to stay stuck in our story.

Oh, no, no, no.

There, you know, everyone's going to leave me.

I know my friend that we've been friends since we were like in grade four, but like at some point long enough, they'll leave me, right?

That friend could break the story, but we don't, we don't want to hold on to that.

So we say, no, no.

At some point this is going to happen.

At some point, it doesn't matter how many good job performance reviews I've gotten.

At some point they're going to realize I don't know what I'm doing.

I'm an imposter, I'm a fraud.

At some point, it's the denial of the thing that has the power to break our story.

I was in here the other day working on some technical issues.

Uh, eating a burger.

I happen to like matzo burgers from AW.

Does anybody know what's in a matzo burger?

Cheese.

Cheese?

What else do we got in there?

Grass-fed beef.

Grass-fed beef, no hormones, good.

Whatever.

There's one more thing, and it's it's a strip.

It's delicious.

Ah.

Where are we currently sitting right now?

I'm eating my bacon burger, and I'm like, this is delicious.

And then I look up and I'm like, God.

Question.

Why is it that we get to eat that most delicious food that is bacon?

I'll tell you why.

Because there was a guy who had a religious story.

His name was Peter.

Peter grew up a good Jewish guy.

His story says his conception of God, I'll use the word story of God today because it's easier, but I usually use the word conception of God to try and show you that this is what it is.

Can you show me the quote from Desmond Tutu?

Desmond Tutu said, um, something along the lines of we must be ready to learn from one another, not claiming that we alone possess all truth and that somehow we have a corner on God.

This is my way of saying story of God, conception of God.

Peter has a story of God.

God doesn't like bacon.

I don't know who came up with that one.

Makes no sense to me.

But he grew up in a long line of people who, as a way to fully express their devotion to a conception of God, they f did not eat pork.

And so Peter, being the good Jewish man who believes in the story that God hates pork.

God hates bacon.

Never eaten bacon in his whole life.

He one day he's he's he's sitting down and he's he has a dream, a vision dream.

We're not sure what it is because it depends how you see it.

Peter's sitting there, and what happens is he he imagines this sheet, and in the sheet is bacon.

It's a lot of things, but there's also bacon in there.

And a voice from heaven that he thinks is God says to him, Eat.

Peter's like, um, yeah, we don't eat bacon.

Eat.

For days he wrestles with, in fact, even in the vision, over and over again.

Eat.

We don't eat bacon.

Eat.

None of my people.

Do you know what would happen if I ate bacon?

Eat.

He has a story of God.

And now he has a new experience that does not fit at all.

He's adamant.

I would not eat.

I will not eat.

I swear, I will not do that.

Do you know what happens if you do that?

Eat.

For weeks he wrestles with this.

For him, it's bacon.

For us, it's whatever the thing that changes our story.

Finally, finally, Peter does the profoundly spiritual work of saying, what if this, what if this is true?

That's how we have bacon.

Protestants eat bacon because Peter changed his story.

The book I'm using today is a book called Anatheism.

It's very technical.

It's a book that says, uh, how do you what's the title?

Finding God after God.

It's the first time I realized how this system of shifting stories can work.

It's not the only way, but it's a way.

It shows that the Jesus component, him saying my conception of God broke, was profoundly spiritual.

And this whole Peter story, he's like, no, no, that's the point.

He says we have a story.

Whatever the story is, I am not enough.

I'm unlovable.

No one will ever be with me.

I'm a fraud.

Whatever your story is, it can be a story of larger things.

Um, if you go on social media on Friend Church's social media, people put posts up there all the time that tell me I don't tell you guys are bad enough.

I should tell you guys are sinners more often.

This isn't, I'm not joking.

Amen.

Gregory, sinner.

Um, but like a good kind of sinner.

Because in their mind, the story of Christianity is you are all bad people.

And you need something to make you okay again.

And so anytime I don't tell you you're bad people, they're going, you're not doing it right.

What are you doing?

Bring out the guilt, bring out the shame.

For whatever reason, something shifted in us.

We don't hold that story anymore.

We hold a story that says, Yeah, I screw things up lots.

And also, I can take water into my world.

I can do things to make the world better.

Anathism says we start off with a story and then something breaks the story.

God, why have you forsaken me?

You should eat bacon, whatever, the positive performance review, the person who loves you, the thing that you do well, whatever the thing that breaks you.

That's he calls it atheism, the rejection of story.

And he says, this is what we do wrong so much.

We don't embrace the atheism.

Because he says, once you've fully got that thing into your bones, he says, something can happen.

And you look back at your story and say, that story doesn't fit anymore.

I'm gonna build a new story.

And we start to evolve.

For some people, very rarely, this is a complete, you know, it's like I'm unlovable, something happens, and I'm fully lovable.

That that is rare.

That's like terminal diagnosis kind of stuff where someone sells their company and spends all the time with their family, like that kind of thing.

Most of us, what happens is we have a story, I'm unlovable, then somebody loves us beautifully.

And then we have a new story.

We might do something like um, I'm hard to love.

Or that person's, well, that's usually trying to get underneath it, but that person's special.

We start to evolve our story.

He calls this process anatheism.

Story, rejection of story, news story.

And then he says you'll have a rejection of that story, and you'll come up with another new story.

And slowly, like compound interest.

You'll wake up one morning at 2 a.m.

and you're thinking about nothing.

Theoretically.

I had a friend.

She had a story that said she took anyone know the five love languages, the book?

Right?

Beautiful idea.

She read it, she got this story in her head.

My partner should meet my need for verbal affirmation.

Her marriage started to fall apart.

Over and over again.

You need to say nice things about me.

You need to tell me why you love me.

You need to tell me.

He didn't.

Her dissatisfaction kept getting more climb and climb and climb to the point where they were almost ready to end their marriage.

Two kids been together for 20-something years.

One day, a counselor said to her, Okay, hold on, let's just take your story.

He doesn't love me because he doesn't say nice things to me.

He said, Does does he ever do anything else for you?

She's like, Well well, yeah.

Anything I ask for, he builds for me.

Whenever my car is broken, he fixes it.

I have to just look at something in our house that's broken, and he takes care of it.

The other day I said, this bathroom needs to be evolved.

He took it out and changed it.

So he consistently does things to show his love, and she said, I seriously thought he did not love me.

Because my story says love has to look this way.

That was enough to start to rebuild their relationship.

Her story said it had to look, love had to look like that language of words of affirmation, and yet he wasn't good with that.

He didn't talk.

I even know the guy.

He's not a talker.

If you get a hey, you're doing pretty good.

But he put so much time and effort into trying to make her life better by doing things, acts of service.

For the first little while, she fought it, but no, that's not right.

It should be this way.

The book told me it should be this way.

Until finally, she let that experience break the story.

The anatheistic idea of we.

Embrace the thing that breaks her story.

And over time, she started to see all the things he did because he loved her.

That's the power of this process.

Is it easy?

No.

It was much easier when she could be like, you're doing it wrong.

The reason I feel this way is because you're doing it wrong.

You're supposed to do it this way.

The book even says, look, it's on chapter four, right there.

When she finally let that break deep in her bones, she realized actually she was the problem.

Her story was destroying their relationship.

And when she shifted the story, they started to rebuild again.

This only works, according to anatheism, if you're willing to embrace the thing that breaks your story.

So as I wrap up, there's two things I want us to pay attention to.

First, do you know your stories?

This is not trivial.

Let me start at a spiritual tradition level of story.

We have stories.

Any of you who have spiritual tradition backgrounds, you have stories.

Sometimes I'll wake you up at 2 a.m.

and be like, I'm a bad person.

I did something wrong.

Some conception of God is angry at me, something in there.

We call this deconstruction.

It's the being aware of the stories of our traditions and how they impact us.

And then there's our personal stories.

I, you know, cocky vents.

Oh, I got all my stories figured out.

I was sitting with my counselor the other day doing some parts work.

Do you remember, guys, when we talked about parts?

It's another way of talking about stories.

I had a part that I was convinced the story was this is an evil part in me.

I got it from my grandfather.

I had a whole story from my grandfather.

He was a complete a-hole, folks.

Like a horrible person.

Horrible.

And so I got this like dark stain from my grandfather inside of me.

And I was like, lady, you need to help me get this thing out.

You need like this thing is bad.

It is like, it just evil.

Five minutes later, also and I realized, no, actually, that's the story I gave it.

That's the story my family gave it.

Anything my grandfather touched was evil.

But he was a very successful businessman.

He could turn almost anything into a business and make it work.

That drive is inside of me.

Not the business acumen.

That's not.

But the drive.

And I realized I kept pushing that drive down because I was like, no, no, the story is that's for my grandfather.

That's evil.

When I finally let it shift out, I was like, well, wait a second, what if there's something good there?

I could just feel myself come alive again.

Sometimes to figure out your story, you can't do it just sitting in your room.

At 2 a.m., it doesn't feel like a story.

It's just truth, it's just reality.

Sometimes you need to sit with someone.

I also write my stories down.

I have a journal.

It's locked and encrypted.

If you are a hacker, I swear you probably can't get to my journal.

I keep it online so I can access it anywhere I want.

And I go through and I read my stories, and I'm like, oh yeah, I do have that story.

Oh yeah, that one keeps coming back.

And sometimes just being able to see it, you can realize, oh wait, that is a story.

That's not me.

That's not reality.

But today I want you to do one more thing.

Write down the experiences that break your stories.

That person who got flowers, take a picture of those flowers, tell it to come back every two weeks and show you the flowers.

So you go, oh yeah, there is something beautiful there.

The person who said that thing to you that changed everything.

Write it down.

Put it into Google Gmail.

You can, you know, you can snooze an email and Gmail if you know that you can do that.

Send yourself an email and then just tell it to snooze and repeat every two weeks.

It'll pop up in the morning when you check in your email.

You're like, oh yeah, there's that thing that broke my story.

When we hold that deep in our bones, we have the power to reconceptualize a new healthier story.

I don't know about you, but I want that desperately.

I watched the whole Cain and Abel thing we talked about that the last couple of weeks.

Story had him kill his brother.

Story had him kicked out of his family.

To not deal with our stories, I believe, has very profound ramifications.

But there's one more thing I want to talk about.

Can you throw up the relational model once more, Esmond, for me?

You see that top section where it says taking water?

We call that we, transcendent we.

If you have stories that keep you up at 2 a.m., so do the people around you.

So are the people who work with you and work for you, who go to school with you.

Oprah Winfrey was born in the deep south to a single mom, teenager, unwed.

Her mom couldn't raise her, so she bounced between her grandparents and her father, never belonging anywhere.

In grade three, people started to treat her horribly.

She was sexually abused for years.

The story she put in her head, this is her words, she put in her head to try and deal with that, said, I have no value.

Her abuser said, You made this happen.

I have no value.

She said in grade four a year into her horrible ordeal.

Her teacher Mary Duncan saw her.

Said, Oprah, I want you to stay after class.

They didn't do anything, she wasn't in trouble.

Mary Duncan just spent time with her.

Like she mattered.

Mary Brown.

Sorry, Mary Duncan, was the person who broke the story in Oprah that said she has no value.

And ultimately allowed her to become the person we know as Oprah.

Oprah said, My teacher saved my life.

We have the power to be that teacher in the lives of the people around us.

As you walk through your life, see the people, see their story.

Ask yourself, how can I screw with their story?

How can I be the thing that completely they're like, oh, how do I deal with this?

Because you know, I have this whole story about I am useless or I'm not smart or I'm not good enough.

And then somebody finds this thing in me and is like right there, right there.

See how beautiful you are?

See how talented you are?

We can be that person that puts the thing into the person that breaks their story so that they can reconfigure their story just like Oprah Winfrey did.

That's how we can use this to take water to our world.

So my encouragement is see your stories, see them as stories.

Hold on to the moments that have broke your story.

Hold on to them like they're spiritual things.

Because they matter.

That gives us enough power to break the story and reconceptualize it.

And then at the same time, go into the world and mess with everyone's story you can possibly mess with so that it can break and they can find something new and beautiful again.

Tell me, would that not be a legacy?

Somebody 30 years from now said, one of you was the person who broke that story.

And I became who I am today.

May we embrace the things that break our unhealthy stories.

And may we be those people that break other people's unhealthy stories.

Amen.

Let's go screw with some people's stories, okay, folks?

Have a great week, everyone.