Let Your Story Ignite

That line, the lines across my face is the story of who I am.

Sit with that right now, the lines in your face, and what put them there.

And hold on to that story.

Today you have a special treat.

You don't have to listen to me again.

It's fantastic.

You're sick of my voice.

Although I figured out a way to come up on stage again, didn't I?

I want to introduce Dave Hill.

Dave Hill is our newest board member, a fantastic speaker, a deep thinker, and somebody who has challenged me to think more deeply about both my story and how to tell a story.

We have a big French welcome.

Hey.

Thank you, sir.

Wow, wow.

What a great intro for my uh my message today.

I feel like I am brushing up against the divine with that uh that group and the and the singing and the original words and just to set set it up.

Uh so I feel so blessed to be in this uh position right now.

So thank you, Alessandra and the team and everybody else who just makes this all happen and look so flawless.

And uh so I want to talk about uh this this summer we've been talking quite a bit about an examining story uh through various books, different perspectives.

And uh we've looked at a a certain element and managing our stories.

Uh one one that stood out to me was the the false story that we can sometimes tell ourselves, uh, and then and then how to break that story and release us into something better than, like that powerful example we heard about Oprah and her school teacher, who uh just helped her, you know, look at a new vision, uh, help her break that sort of thinking pattern that she had had so that she was able to blossom into something amazing.

Uh and so uh we've also heard about some people say that, well, um my life doesn't really count unless I'm suffering.

In other words, no pain, no gain philosophy.

And uh, and we thought about, okay, well, we have to, how do we break that that thinking as well?

And so uh we've been encouraged to reframe some of those stories we're telling ourselves, and that uh actually God enjoys joy and enjoys us having joy, and and to see it that way is uh is a powerful thing.

And uh, and last week, uh learning about the rationalizing of the stories of the Bible and and seeing our story meshing with that, but really focusing on the humanity of those stories.

And that was uh interesting for me to take at that perspective as well.

So, but today I'm gonna be talking about something a little bit different, related, but it's about the sense of our own story that we heard about in some of the music there.

Our own sort of chapters that make up our life, our life experience in a way, and how that can be a very powerful and impactive and inspirational uh story to tell others and creating connection when you do that.

It's a it's an amazing thing.

And and I want, by the end of today, I want to leave you with the reality that if we have the courage to share our stories, um not just emotionally, but but to change us, change our behaviors.

And and and if we allow ourselves to be moved by other stories, that's the other part of it, then it's this great back and forth that happens and uh making better versions of ourselves.

So when we when we share our life stories, we aren't just reminiscing.

Um, we're handing someone else a survival kit, if you think of it that way.

Um, and that they might need even decades down the line.

And so I want to jump off of the story uh that uh let's look at a story, someone's story who made a difference in another person's story.

And this is the story of Commander James Lovell.

You may have remembered him from the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, where an explosion crippled his craft, and uh his crew were in dire peril of either freezing or suffocating or both.

Uh, they were a long way from home, 200,000 miles.

You couldn't just call up the AAA roadside assistants in that case.

But Lovell didn't see despair.

Uh, he took hold of a story that he had read and been aware of many years before.

And it was the story, the life of Ernest Shackleton.

Maybe many of you are aware of that, but an expedition to Antarctica in 1914, where his ship was crushed by sea ice.

They had to leave.

And and and through impossible odds, two years later, he brought back every one of those crew members back to Britain, whole and sound.

And so this story became uh more of a psychological blueprint for James Lovell, as he shared many times in talks that he's given.

It taught him how to pivot from disaster to survival.

And because of that one leader's story of survival, it provided the courage and inspiration to lead his crew from that vacuum of space safely back to Earth.

So our stories just don't entertain, they can actually save us.

So I find inspiration in stories like that, uh, particularly people's life stories.

And maybe the more clinical term is biographies, but I like life stories, it sounds better.

Um and and and where outcomes have been changed to the positive.

Uh, so I'm not just talking about an entertaining story, although that's great too.

I'm talking about uh not just being moved emotionally, but also effectively having someone else's story change your story, move the needle for you.

So, and some stories are so important that we just need to be kept reminded of them.

I think of, I think of memorials, I think of um things like the Holocaust and World Wars.

That, yes, lest we forget, we need to be telling those stories to next generations.

They're important.

So, what stories inspire you?

Can you think of a time when you heard or read someone's story that impacted you?

Could you see the power of story?

I want to share an example of this and how sharing of stories changed my notion of story, storytelling.

So I'm gonna do like they do in the movies.

I'm gonna give you a picture of a situation, and then I'm gonna give you the background that led up to that picture.

So the picture is this I'm sitting in a room with two grown men who are weeping and then embracing each other, and yet they walked into that room as adversaries.

So, how did that happen?

Well, some background.

As many of you know, I've worked as a in my career as a mediator, and I was on the roster of mediators at the Alberta uh provincial court.

And that's a system where when people are, it's a civil court, so if you're going to be suing somebody uh usually over contractual or money issues, rather than clogging up the court system, they direct you to a mandatory mediation process.

And uh I found myself as a mediator in that process, and that's how I became in that room uh with those two uh men.

So I do feel free to talk about the story.

It's happened 20 years ago, and there's no identifying uh elements that would identify any of the parties.

But so this is a case where a father and son found themselves with me in that room, and the father had made a claim against his son.

Um, and it was over a car, not just any car.

This was a restored 1960s muscle car uh where they had put a lot of sweat equity into it, and basically it was showroom ready once they were done with it.

Now, over the last few years, the father and son relationship had been strained.

Uh the father's wife had passed, the son's mother, and he had remarried.

And I I got I picked up that things weren't going super well in that relationship, and the son and the and the new wife, it wasn't going well too.

There was a lot of angst and stress, conflict, expectations.

And and so um by now the father had been married for a number of years, and he made an arrangement to sell this car to his son, and uh everything was going fine and he was making payments, and then all of a sudden, things happened in the son's life where he had his own uh relationship issues with his uh life partner.

He had to leave, had to move.

He also lost his job, was laid off.

And so uh the payments uh were late, they weren't coming.

And and so the father, he the father had sent text messages, or no, I think it was emails just saying, where's the money?

Where's the money?

And he thought it was a bit odd that his father would react like that.

But um, but they had grown apart over the last couple of years, and so a civil claim had been made.

In some ways, he couldn't believe that his father was actually doing this, but yet here we were in the room.

I had gone over the preliminaries, and the son was going to begin telling his story.

And as he shared his story about his loss of job, his relationship, his having to move, all new information for the father.

And um, so we we sometimes make assumptions that you know people would have known all of that.

And then and then the father spoke, and he told his own story of his own difficulty with his relationship with his new uh wife, and that she had been, you know, really pressing on the finances.

What you're not getting payments.

You you you go in there, you you get the money that's due to you.

You he he's taking advantage of you, he's you you you let people walk all over you.

This was the the messaging he was getting.

And the ultimatum was made that if you don't come out of that mediation with a win, then I'm walking.

Whoa.

So the stakes were high.

And and then he continued to share, and then something happened.

As he as he did so, he started uh to break down, and he regretted the position that he had put his son in.

And the son, when he told his story, he could see the commonality in there both of their situations.

He too began to break down.

And something happened between them.

They eventually embraced, and the father just said, I'm withdrawing this action.

And uh I'll go home, I'll tell my wife, and you know what, I'll let the chips fall where they may.

And you know, I thought, you know, while one relationship was starting to heal, perhaps another relationship was going to be taking a different form.

And I remember thinking, I couldn't help but thinking at the time, you know, if only uh the wife was in that room to hear the stories and to be influenced.

There's something happens when you have that, even an ounce of empathy that happens, it can have a way of helping you shift.

So it wasn't about money, it wasn't about the car, it wasn't about relationship, but it was mutual empathy that moved the needle for those folks.

And I think stories really work when there is that element of empathy.

Empathy is vital in engaging with the story.

That's why you share yours and listen to others.

I want to unpack, though, the medium of storytelling.

It's just kind of an interesting study when you look at it.

It's it's it's really a defining essential trait of humans.

We love our stories.

We love the story of the underdog who triumphs, the antagonist who gets their due.

Uh, justice ultimately triumphs, uh, where great achievements are realized.

And uh, we have an innate ability to connect with those.

And I believe that there's a divine space that's created when honest and personal storytelling happens.

A spiritual synapse is created, a space where your view of things is allowed to be altered even a little bit, to explore different stories, and that stone that perhaps you're stuck in gets a little malleable.

Stories basically are the emotional currency that we deal in.

I think it's because stories are life.

They make up our lives.

They are in fact life.

They're the marks we make now, the ones we leave behind when we're gone.

The language of story seems to be baked into our DNA.

We swim in stories all around us.

Even from the very earliest days when we couldn't even read or understand.

We were told bedtime stories, there were campfire stories, there were ghost stories, there were medieval Middle Earth stories and futuristic stories.

They engage the creative area of our brain so that we're able to at least in some way put ourselves in the shoes of those characters in the stories.

And there's powerful stories in the Bible.

The Bible's full of stories.

Uh, it seems to be the main conduit of learning and teaching.

So that tells me if God is into stories, that's a great endorsement for us to be into stories, to tell and listen and hear and be present in them.

And there's this particularly one story that uh impacted me in the Bible, and that's where the woman was caught in adultery and was going to be stoned, even if it was a rape, not her fault.

And Jesus speaks into that situation.

He makes it personal by saying, Okay, you guys, whoever is without sin, you've you cast the first stone.

And so there was a shift in the crowd.

There was a little bit of empathy that happened there.

And being in that person's shoes, even briefly, created a behavior shift.

And that's what happened there.

But also about story.

Do you remember that story on the radio or that show on the radio that was called And Now for the Rest of the Story?

And that was Paul Harvey, and he did these incredible stories.

He picked a story that was, it seemed kind of generic.

We didn't really have a connection to it, but he kind of carefully crafted that story so that at some point at the punchline, ah, you made it, you had a recognition, your jaw dropped, you had the aha moment, and and it was impactive for you.

So the way you tell your stories can have an have an impact, but you don't need to be a Paul Harvey storyteller to make your stories known and heard.

Uh, there's another uh story that I've or show that I've uh connected to, and that's on the CBC, and it's called We Regret to Inform You.

Maybe some of you have heard about it, but it's about stories about people who have had various pursuits, but be they athletic, vocational, or artistic, and that they have received rejection after rejection after rejection.

And then ultimately, through some extraordinary perseverance and maybe a little bit of luck, they break through with spectacular results.

We love these stories.

They can be very motivating.

But but our stories can be just as motivating, even if they aren't as spectacular as that.

They don't have to be.

And I'm because I'm not just talking about a story here, I'm talking about your story.

In in or the chapters in your story, and there can be many.

It's unique to you.

No one can can really correct it.

Uh, it's it's complete with all the vagaries, capriciousness of life.

Um, but there's something unique that happens.

And you know, and you know, that story, it's it's yours.

There's it's incontrovertible.

The facts are incontrovertible.

No one's gonna argue them because it's your story.

I think that one of the greatest missed opportunities is not telling our stories.

It's the shrouding of our stories.

You remember that children's chorus, How Did It Go?

Hide it under a bushel, no, I'm gonna let it shine.

So if we have that approach, I know it sounds easy to say, but it's sometimes a bit difficult to do.

Uh, but the encouragement, the camaraderie, the learnings, the wisdom, and the inspiration all work to build us as humans and uh and to a better version of ourselves.

So the point is your story matters.

And that's what I appreciate about the emphasis on story here at Friends, Oliver stories.

It becomes a spiritual practice.

I I remember well hearing Bryce's story up here in the interview that he went through, and being raised in a less than ideal situation.

And my heart broke for that little boy I saw in the in the picture, who was trying to normalize, trying to make the best of a very difficult situation, and and and trying to create normality in his life.

And and then the courage he had to break free of that, courage beyond his years to do that, and then form his own path.

And then, even as an adult, reaching out for professional uh input into healing and and and making and making things better, a healing process.

Um overcoming these really was inspirational to me, transcending above his circumstances.

Um, it was inspiring, and the connection that was made between just me, the listener, and him.

And and so there's there's three reasons right there to share your story.

The empathy gained and ability to be moved and shifted, the inspiration that comes from it, and uh and the connection and community that we have through that.

So let's talk, let's talk about sharing our stories.

And as I've said, your story matters, so it doesn't need to be polished.

There's no need to be writer to defend yourself.

They're your facts.

So what's holding us back from doing that sharing?

Oh, some might say, well, if I tell my story, the real story, people won't like me.

And or my story really isn't that interesting.

Why would anybody want to hear it?

Um, or my story's so messing and confusing, people just won't even understand it.

Maybe they won't make sense of it.

Or maybe it's it goes against cultural or political lines, and I don't know, offend.

And and we also might be reticent about our stories because of any shame that might we might associate with them.

So, yes, uh, it takes courage.

It definitely becomes easier in the telling.

And it's also totally okay to say, you know what, this part of my story, I have a bit of difficulty telling, but uh, but I'll tell it anyways.

And that cultivates gracious ears that are listening.

It takes a little bit of special sensitivity, particularly these days and the privacy rules.

But if you know your audience and if you're telling your story from a kindness perspective, you're gonna they're gonna cut you a lot of slack.

Your motivation is good.

So relating our stories brings connection.

It really is a foundation for our sense of well-being and community.

To quote Brene Brown.

In fact, it was Brene Brown who talked a lot about shame in our stories.

And for her, being vulnerable was a big part of success for her.

It paid big dividends, and I don't mean success in terms of monetary and book sales, I mean personal success in being able to be vulnerable.

And that's part of what it takes to tell the story, isn't it?

So the benefits of this risk taking we heard in the story, are in the healing and in the connection we heard in the song.

And uh when that happens, when you when you when you've been effective in telling your story, what happens is the other party will tell their story.

Because that's how you know you've been affected, because there's a connection that made.

Oh, that's the story.

Well, I have a similar one.

And and and so there you've made community and you've made connection.

So we've talked about our telling our stories and being vulnerable and the courage to be vulnerable and the benefits uh that can be gained from that.

But so what about being on the other end of the story?

You're listening to that story.

What's your responsibility to respond to someone who's just being vul that vulnerable and being open?

Well, it's about being present, it's about being attentive, being curious.

It's it's it's not giving solutions or advice or judgment unless some particular advice is being asked for.

So let me provide a personal example of someone uh who had to listen to my story and the effect it had on me.

Have you ever had that experience of sitting in front of someone who has the power to judge and make a decision for you that you don't have control over?

And you feel powerless and vulnerable.

And all you have is your story.

I was still relatively new as an inspector with the uh regulator in the province and going out to inspect oil and gas facilities.

I was brand new to the industry.

Even after several years, I was still trying to get a kind of grip on it.

I was working out of the field office in Red Deer, and we all had a vehicle assigned to us at the time.

And since I was a new staff member in a very seasoned office, I got the job of having to mile out everybody else's vehicle, and they got a new one, and I still was ha getting the hand me downs, but that was okay.

About three years later, it was my turn.

And I got a brand new Chevrolet Impala with a 307 cubic inch small block V8.

And I was proud of it.

We didn't even have to have a logo on it, so it kind of looked like a personal car.

We even had personal use as a bit of a perk.

And uh, and this was one of the very first cars in the field office.

I got the car that had air conditioning and something called cruise control.

Those two items, wow.

Before that, it was the 460 air conditioning system, four windows down, 60 miles an hour type of air conditioning.

But but now we had we had one.

So I was proud of this vehicle.

I was going to take care of it.

And uh and so one rainy day, I was out doing uh an inspection work.

It was getting towards the end of the day, so I was definitely um driving with some determination and uh found found uh try found what I thought was the access road.

I had to find this access road into a suspended well site so that it had been grown over the road.

And um, so I was about the top of this hill, I was coming down to the bottom of the hill, and it was a gray-day, gravelly road.

But there was a big three-quarter ton truck who thought it would be a good idea to stop at the bottom of the hill in the middle of the road so he could look at his cows.

And so uh I came behind him, and uh, although I saw it in the at the last minute, I I ran out of runway.

And uh it was more than just a little fender bender.

Did you know that cars are made so that the roof actually coils 360 degrees to absorb impact?

That was kind of a curious thing I noticed about that little little learning there, um, what the engineers do to make cars.

But uh I then had to show up uh the next day um uh with my boss with the incident and accident um report.

And I did, I went through the whole, I explained the story.

And you know what?

He listened, and at the end he sort of said, So what was your learning?

Um talking about you know, speed and paying attention and um and so um he said at the end, four words I remember, he said, it was an accident.

Now, two percent of the damage was on the car, the on the truck that had a great big bumper, and it was 15 years old.

98% of the damage was on my three-month-old car.

So uh so I guess what?

I went back to miling out cars and uh in the office.

I was happy to do it.

Um, but he said to me it was an accident, and those words stuck with me.

And there wasn't judgment, there wasn't what were you thinking?

What does that do to our accident record for the office?

And it was he could have done all that, and he would have been very, very justified in doing that.

But it was like he understood.

I felt that he understood the situation, and and I still felt like I belonged, I still felt like I had community, I wasn't ostracized.

I've heard I heard understanding, and I've also learned that understanding is not agreeing, and so that when someone tells their story, although you can uh show that you're understanding, that's about validating.

It's about making their story feel like it's theirs.

It's important.

And so you don't have to agree and say, oh yeah, you did the right thing.

You can you can understand and they can feel whole in that understanding.

So it's interesting.

A year later, I'd been given the responsibility to manage a trainee, engineer, summer student.

And he was also given a field vehicle and to carry out the field work that he had.

And one day he called me from the field and he said that he had rolled his truck in the ditch.

And he was okay, but once again, we had the incident reform.

Only it was me who had the incident reform and supervising him.

It's funny how life goes in circles, doesn't it, that way?

And he was a good kid, a good employee, and he shared quite openly and vulnerably, and he shared the that he had a morbid fear of bees, and a bee had come into his cab, and in his frantic wish not to be stung, he lost control and went in the ditch and rolled.

And so there I was at a point.

Now I had been raised in sort of the old school, the supervisor always lords it over people, puts thumbs down, and because that's just your job, you're the supervisor, you're the boss.

But I remembered back to my situation and the boss and how he handled my situation.

And I told him it was an accident.

Now that made a difference for him too.

So you see how the effective story and story and story will will hopefully go on, and he'll make the same judgment when he has the same situation to him.

So that experience shifted me and shifted my story.

So, as well as the obvious reasons for telling our stories, like making connection and getting to know people, the importance of generating empathy and the extension that that healing then brings with that.

And it can't be overstated.

And so I'll posit that our real stories are shared not just for information.

And when they're not done with manipulative intent, there's something of the divine that happens in that moment.

And we make spiritual connection.

While I was preparing for this message, I came across this quote, uh, which I was, I believe is also referenced by Brene Brown and uh and coming from some ancient writings.

Anyway, she paraphrased it.

I don't know if we have it on the uh yes, there it is there.

There are themes that are cross-cultural, like love, loss, and hope, which remind us of our connectedness, and that we are truly never alone in life's journey.

Sharing our stories reveal that our many different paths of life and spirituality often scale the same mountain.

We're all on the same kind of journey together, and the interconnectedness is important along the way.

And so at Friends, we honor the many and unique uh spiritual journeys that we see represented here.

And as a spiritual practice, I see a lot of the story sharing, and that really builds me up and helps me on my spiritual journey.

We honor, we celebrate those stories.

In preparing uh this message, I uh I sometimes wake up at like 5 or 5:30 in the morning and just I either remember something I hadn't done, or I something enters my new idea.

Anyways, a few days ago it came to me this image, and it was uh an image of a library, a massive, almost infinite room full of books, shelves and shelves, and stacks and stacks that just seemed to go on limitlessly.

And I saw all these books all neatly ordered in a row, and the analogy for me was that those books, each one of them represented each one of our lives, and the stories that are sometimes trapped in those volumes.

And the only way for those stories to be released is that they need to be opened, read, spoken about, illuminated for the story to benefit all of us.

So that's the encouragement today.

Let's try to open those books, tell our stories, be inspired, be shifted, and make some spiritual connections.

Thank you.