Year of Stories

I got up this morning and flipped on the news. They were discussing New Years Resolutions. I flipped the channel over to HBO and they had the Bucket List on. Okay two things that are trying to tell me to make a resolution on what I want to change or things I would like to accomplish in the new year. That's a tough question. There are lots of little things that I can always name easily that I would like. Lose weight. More time to write. More time period for the things that I love to do. Spending time with family and friends. But after watching the Bucket List I took a moment to try to figure out some bigger goals. That's a tough one.

I know that during Spring Break we will go to Disney World for Jade's first time ever. She is really looking forward to that. I had one of my biggest goals two years ago when I went to New York and saw shows on Broadway for the first time ever. When I was in school I always thought I would travel the world. Adopting my daughter allowed me to see China including Beijing, Hong Kong, and a layover in Tokyo. Traveling doesn't' seem to be a realistic goal at the moment. Financially everything is pretty tight. One of my goals I've had for several years now is to end the year with less debt than I started it. I was able to achieve some of that but life didn't really cooperate towards the end of the year with having to repair and replace a couple of big ticket items like plumbing systems, appliances and automobiles.

As I thought back over what I went through in 2009 I thought about how the year began with my father in the hospital as 2008 ended and my worries about his health. The ice storm took most of my focus for two months in January and February. I was pretty stressed both mentally and physically and in February ended up spending a night in the hospital because of a pain in my chest. Then I helped judge the local competition for America's Got Talent and helped select Kevin Skinner. I went right from that into The Wizard of Oz and that kept me busy until the July. We had Jade do some testing to see if we could help her with her school work and that took sometime to work through and we are just now able to make a plan to help her. A short summer vacation back to see my family and then back to work on Smoke on the Mountain Homecoming and Tom Dick and Harry. Through all that my shoulder has been keeping me in and out of the doctors office and I finally got a procedure scheduled for next Monday. In the meantime I strained my left shoulder and elbow trying to compensate for my right injured shoulder. I didn't start out with any new years resolutions in 2009 and lots of things happened.

Maybe it's best if I don't start out with any resolutions in 2010. What I think about is that most of life takes place in the stories about what happens to us while we are doing the everyday things. For me last years stories were about family, weather, work, money and trying to stay healthy. I have a feeling that many of the stories that will come in 2010 will be about the very same things. I feel very fortunate that I get to work in a career that tells stories. Many of my personal stories last year and the stories that I helped bring to life in the theatre helped to give a way to appreciate what life means. After 4 years of Education for Ministry class the one thing I learned was that we are still experiencing the same basic stories that were written thousands of years ago. While the details may be different the themes are the same. The search for love, for respect, for meaning are still just as consuming now as they were then. As we take in a story about someone else we realize, how much more alike we are than how different. The stories that inspire me are how we pick ourselves up and start again after we get knocked down. How we learn how to smile and sometimes even to share a laugh in the midst of pain. How we learn how to find love by giving it away when it hurts to give it with no expectation that it will be returned. And how we learned what it meant to be a friend, a father, a husband, a brother and a son and not talk but listen to the stories that someone else needs to tell.

A year from now I hope that when and if I'm able to sit down and think about resolutions for 2011 that I will have lots of new stories to tell.