I wrote this for my RA staff around the end of the school year. I read it to them during a meeting I ran. I cried, uncontrollably. I edited it to make it easier to relate to. Enjoy.
I am dealing with a lot of “lasts” here at Bethel and from that I think alot about the moments I’ve had. Moments with friends, professors, roommates, and crushes.
Being who I am, a media communication major, I love the media. Music, film, social networks, I love it all. One way I connect with God is through the media. In every good media there is usually, at least for me, a moment that the light goes off, the switch turns on, the bridge is connected, where everything just clicks. It’s moment like that where I experience God or I learn something applicable to life and love.
Moments are a funny thing. When we want to tell stories to one another we rarely tell it the same each time. It’s always a moment that we remember and build off of it from there. Like when I ripped a bag of Honey Nut Scooters open, playing swords, playing racquetball, talking about birth, playing the game Tanks and commanders, or talking about broccoli, or watching someone find her long lost iPod, or helping someone in need, climbing trees, or talking about cameras, doing P90X, Chipotle runs, and running around Heritage at 2am during finals week. Moments that I don’t plan on forgetting and want to cherish forever.
It only takes a second to define a moment.
A second is all it takes to make a moment. To make a memory. To set a story in motion. Just a second, and you know if you've done something good or bad. A second to make a decision that makes something set in motion.
It’s like this: “The saddest thing about life is you don’t remember half of it. You don’t even remember half of half of it. Not even a tiny percentage, if you want to know the truth. When we die and sit down with God I’ll tell him what I did with my life and when I am done with my story, God will probably sit there looking at me, wondering what to talk about next” (Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years)
To be cliche’ the line from Hitch rings true here. Life isn’t measured in the amount of breaths you take, but the moments that take your breath away.
All good stories have moments that take our breath away. All good stories also involve fear. This fear causes conflict and all good stories have conflict.
Fear sucks. I hate fear. Donald Miller describes it like this: “Fear is an manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring story” (A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, 108).
To live a good story you must face the fear that is holding you back from living a good story.
