What’s Your Story?

“What’s your story?”

That is a common question we ask when we are getting to know someone. We are asking things like, “Where are you from? Are you married? What do you do for a living?” Once we gather this information, we come to know their story. But I ask this question with a different intent. When I ask to know someone’s story, I want to know what story they are living by. What story is shaping their life?

We are story-making people. We love stories (Once upon a time . . . ). Our narratives help us make sense of our world. The big questions in life are, What is God like? Who am I? What is the meaning of life? What can I count on? What is the good life? What are my deepest needs? When we put together our answers we have a metanarrative, a large story that is capable of answering life’s key questions. This story operates at a higher level, and once it is adopted it becomes a part of our unconscious mind. We do not have to think about the story consciously. We realize it’s there only when it has been threatened.

Our stories are running our lives—in ways we may not even be aware of. Let’s say your family led you to believe you are inadequate. They communicated this to you in many ways, usually not through words. Perhaps it was a disappointed glance or a failure to listen to you. The story of your inadequacy becomes a defining narrative of your identity, and it will shape your decisions and actions and feelings for many, many years. It does not matter whether the narrative is true or not. All that matters is that you believe it to be true.

What story have you been told about God? What have you been told about the gospel or about the Christian life, about Jesus, about the cross, about who you are, or about heaven? Your answers to these questions form a story that will determine how your life will go. If you wrote down your answers to these questions—if you told me the story you have been told, the stories you are telling yourself—and sent them to me to read, I believe I could predict how your life is going and will go without having met you.

The answers would reveal your ability to trust, to love, and to hope. I would know your capacity for courage. I would even be able to determine your level of joy—because the stories you are living by are running your life. You are living at their mercy.

If what I am stating is true, then the most important thing we can do is to start living into the right story. Any story worth giving the power to shape our lives must pass a simple test: Is it beautiful, good, and true? If it is, then it is a magnificent story. You were designed for nothing less.

The Magnifying Power of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth

The word magnificent is defined as that which is beautiful, good, and true. The root word is magnify, which means to enlarge, enhance, and expand. When something is magnificent it has the power to magnify. That is what Mary said to her relative Elizabeth in her famous speech we call “the Magnificat”: “My soul magnifies the Lord” (Luke 1:46). Mary had just learned the amazing news that she would bear a Son who would save the world. This good news led her—in the depths of her soul—to magnify the Lord. The story of the annunciation is an example of beauty, goodness, and truth.

Here is the story in a contemporary form: “Catch this: God is going to become human. God has chosen a lovely young woman of deep faith to conceive and bear and raise this child, who is fully God and fully human. Wow. And she is going to agree—to say, ‘Let it be unto me.’ She will suffer, but every generation will call her blessed. God is going to move into our neighborhood and pitch his tent among us in order to save us.” The story of Advent, the Christmas story, is beautiful and good and true.

What makes something beautiful, good, or true? Beauty, goodness, and truth are called the three transcendentals. This is because they transcend—or stand above—the physical realm. They are real, perhaps more real than the physical realm. They are invincible and unbreakable, too powerful to be changed. The Greek philosopher Plato was the first person to link them together and speak of them as a group. Plato was interested in the purification of our souls, and he believed that the three transcendentals could ennoble the soul. In this book you will encounter the word transcendental many times.

Beauty

Thomas Aquinas said beauty is “that which, when seen, pleases.” Beauty is the combination of several elements that, when put into the right form, are pleasing. On the campus where I teach there are rosebushes. When they are in bloom, I love to stop and—well, you know—smell the roses.

What makes something beautiful? Theologians such as Augustine of Hippo, in the fourth century, and Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, wrote about the components of beauty, such as clarity, proportion, wholeness, and harmony. Most people see a rose and find it to be beautiful. The color, shape, and texture of the rose are what we see, but their combination is what makes it beautiful.

We do not need to understand the qualities of beauty to know it or to love it. The slogan in an ad for a luxury car reads, “Performance that moves you. Beauty that stops you in your tracks.” Even though it is an advertising slogan, it tells an important truth: beauty is very powerful. It really does stop us in our tracks. Many people who gaze on the Grand Canyon find themselves at a loss for words. Most people are affected by the beauty of a car, a home, a flower, or a sunset even if they are not conscious of it. There are higher and deeper objects of beauty that may be more difficult—perhaps even impossible—to see.

Music, architecture, poetry, pottery, photography, food preparation and presentation, painting, carpentry, and interior design are evaluated by our sense of beauty. I enjoy watching home renovation television shows. At the end of the show (the big reveal), as the people walk through their newly renovated and redecorated homes, they all say the same thing: “Wow, it is so beautiful!” I once counted the number of times people in the show used the word beautiful: eleven times in two minutes.

I went with my wife, Meghan, to St. Martin’s-in-the-Field in London on a warm summer evening to hear a classical music concert. As we sat down, the eastern window caught my eye. The window is a kind of stained glass without the stain—clear, etched glass with a tilted oval in the center, a modern depiction of the tilted head of Jesus on the cross. It has been called one of the most significant pieces of religious art commissioned in modern times. As the sun went down, the musicians walked in silence into the candlelit sanctuary.

Then the five musicians began playing, first Mozart’s Divertimento in D Major, then Pachelbel’s Canon in D, followed by Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” and ended with Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons—all four seasons. We listened in a state of rapture. When they played the last note we looked at each other and were both weeping. Why? We were not sad; quite the opposite. We wept because we had been touched by beauty. The beauty of the church, the glass window piece, and the sounds of musical notes arranged exquisitely created an epiphanic experience....