They Weren’t My Stories

We were walking down to the dock when Jonathan told me to switch sides.

He needed me on his right. He’s deaf in his left ear. If I stayed on that side, he’d miss most of what I said.

I moved over, and we kept walking. And I asked him about it. Had he always been deaf in that ear, or did it come on later?

Later, he said. It happened shortly after his first wife died.

Jonathan’s first wife Mel battled cancer for several years before losing the fight in 1994. I can still remember when I found out. It was the summer before my senior year in high school. I was at Boys State.

Not long after, he came down with what seemed like an ordinary ear infection. He didn’t have a fever, and it didn’t seem to be serious to his doctor. They decided to give it the weekend.

On Sunday, he was leading the church service and went to stand up from kneeling. He nearly fell over. The hearing in that ear was gone, and it didn’t come back.

I sat with that for a second, and then I asked him what I really wanted to know.

Did he hold any bitterness about it? Because it sounded like the kind of thing that could have gone differently. A different doctor. Antibiotics administered. Some small turn that could have left him with his hearing.

He didn’t go to any of those places.

What he said instead was that he’d read many stories, but they weren’t his stories.

I keep coming back to that line.

There’s a version of his life where the doctor takes immediate action. The antibiotics come. He keeps his hearing. He could live in that version, bitter about the one he actually got, replaying the small turn that might have gone the other way.

But that version didn’t happen. The story that did is the one where he lost his hearing the same season, he lost his wife. Holding onto bitterness would mean living in revenge and regret, wrapped up in a life that isn’t his. That isn’t the story he’s choosing.

So, he lives the story that is actually his, hearing loss and all. It asks a lot of him. The hearing loss makes the work he loves harder. He loved the small group work of ministry. Especially working with children. When you facilitate a group, you sit in a circle. And in a circle, he can only hear half the room. He knows what it costs. And he lives it as his own anyway.

There are a lot of ways to end up living a story that isn’t yours. You can lose yourself in bitterness over the one you wanted instead. You can live out a story someone handed you. You can live a story that society writes for you. Either way you’re somewhere other than in your story.

I know that pull. For a long time, I was living a story that wasn’t really mine. Heart-Strong was part of my own way back to the one that is. A year of exploring where love and fear show up in the world. Listening. Learning. Experiencing. And sharing.

And now it’s growing into something bigger than just my adventure. Heart-Strong is becoming a nonprofit. Not because the adventure is ending, but because it was never meant to be mine alone. The whole point is helping other people live their own stories. Not the bitter ones. Not the borrowed ones. The ones that are theirs.

We believe that when people have the courage to live their stories as their whole selves, everything around them starts to change. Families heal. Communities grow stronger. And the world gets a little closer to what it could be.

Jonathan chose to live his story as his own. No revenge, no bitterness, no pretending it should have gone some other way. And it’s what I want Heart-Strong to help people do too.

Stay tuned for more information on the next phase of our adventure and building Heart-Strong as a nonprofit.

Learn more at www.heart-strong.org