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Recently the girls from my local church gathered for a delicious morning tea + inspirational message. The theme of the morning was “What’s Your Story?” paired with “Because”.
Part of the morning included breaking into small groups + writing our own story. I’ve done this exercise before, but each time it gets me thinking + my story seems to change.
With storytelling as one of the main themes I seem to write about here (see previous posts: ‘What’s Your Story?‘ ‘Looking For Their Story‘ ‘Write A Good One‘ ‘The Story Is The Power‘ ‘Ira Glass on Storytelling‘), I thought it would be helpful to share the exercise with you so you can ponder + write your own.
:: write your story ::
Fold a piece of paper in half + use each side of the paper as pages – so it’s in ‘book form’. Or, simply write it on unfolded paper.
// TITLE (front page)
Every story has a title. Your life is a story. What does yours say?
// CONTENTS (page II)
Every story has a contents page. In the contents of your life, write down 8 different chapter titles – the first four being highlights + defining moments of your life to date, the last four being the titles of what you’d like the story to read in the future.
// IMAGES (page III)
Draw images relating to your contents – a visualisation of what the story reads.
// SUMMARY (page IV)
A summary about your life, using the contents page as a guide.
Once you see your life plotted out in front of you, it reminds you of the goodness in the past + enables you to have some clarity + vision for the future.
Don’t like how your story reads so far? You can always change it, one word at a time…
“And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone.” – Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts
