What's your story?

I've been back from Chicago for a week and a half but I'm still trying to process everything that I heard. The Story 09 conference was incredible; great leadership, innovative and more creativity than I can even describe. It would take 50 posts to convey everything that I learned, but I'm going to focus on one thing.

Donald Miller recently released his new book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. If you're content with your life, please don't read it. It jacked me up entirely. I bought it several weeks ago but I didn't read it until I was flying to Chicago. If reading the book wasn't enough, Donald spoke at the conference as well. By Wednesday night I was wrecked.

The premise of the book is this: you are telling a story with your life. It might be a great story or a horrible story, but either way you're telling it. You are the leading character, for better or for worse. The whole story line revolves around the choices you make.

I'm a writer, so I think a lot about characters, plot lines and settings. I have a whole collection of people who live in my imagination, just waiting for an opportunity to leap onto the page and start living their stories. What I've realized in the past ten days is, I spend more time thinking about their stories than I do living mine. My fictional characters have all kinds of adventure, romance and suspense. I spend nine hours a day at my laptop. I'm not living an adventure, there is a most definite absence of romance, and the only suspense I have is whether my pay check will cover my bills. That's not a good story.

I've realized that some part of me believed that once I write the bestseller, my life (my story) will really begin. Here's the scary part though; Donald Miller had already written the bestseller and moved into the new condo and he still had a story he didn't like. The condo didn't make the story any better and neither did the bestseller. Those things may have changed the setting, but they didn't do anything for character development. He had to make choices to change the story he was living; not just the stories he was writing.

I want to live a better story...and I have no excuse not to. I belong to (arguably) the greatest church on the planet, I have great friends, a supportive family and enough sense not to play in traffic. I should be living a great story!!!

I've decided that my problem is based primarily in selfishness and fear of the unknown. I say I want adventure, but I don't like talking to people I don't already know. I say I want suspense, but I sit on my couch instead of taking a risk. We don't even have time to enter the romance debate, but suffice it to say that I have some hang-ups there too. And the downside to all of this: writing a bestseller won't change any of it.

So here I am, again, at the foot of the cross asking God to heal me some more. I want to live a great story...a story that makes Jesus famous and brings glory to God. That's probably not going to happen sitting on my couch.

What's your story? Are living life to the full or do you have a remote in one hand and cheetos in the other? I don't want to have another conversation about somebody else's adventure; I want to be living my own. Any thoughts on how I can get started?