The clinking of the knives on the side of a water glass at the wedding reception, beckoning the new bride and groom to kiss…yet again. It’s the tradition I grew up with, but the shtick is stale now. We get it. They are married. They have probably kissed a million times at this point. Especially these friends…dedicated and in love with each other for more than a dozen years before the wedding. So the groom cut us off before we got started. “We will kiss one time to the glass clinking gimmick. If you do it after that, you have to tell a story. Then maybe we will kiss…” The first tinkling of the glass brought a story from an old roommate; the next, a story from a sister-in-law. Then another friend, then a colleague, and then the fellows they mentored. There was raucous laughter and still silence; awkward pauses; a few tears. All of it…stories.

When I was a kid, I would ask my dad to come tuck me into bed. I demanded that he not only tell me good-night and kiss my forehead, but lay next to me for a minute, and tell me a story. I remember stories he told me about his dad, my grandfather; about him playing baseball with his buddies; about working in the dairy where he met my mother. I remember the calming moments, resting next to my daddy while he told me the stories, and the pictures I dreamed in my head to be the movie to his screenplay.

Stories engaged me then and now, they have no less of a gravitational pull on me, drawing me in to understand someone. You see, everyone has a story. Some are more colorful than others. Some are more comedy, some more tragedy. But all of us have a story.

My patients have stories to tell. When I have paused long enough to listen to a story, I have met professors and musicians, poets and scientists; great-grandfathers and siblings; hopefuls, burnouts, and failures; neighbors and friends; the winners and the always-losers. In every story, I see a little thread of myself. I see the incredible joy and the desperate pain. I taste the sweet experience that we all share…being human.

Everyone one of us has a story. A dear friend relays his story of near death after a health scare; a colleague shares his crisis of burnout; a cousin shares her victory over a vice. Stories are personal. Stories are relatable. Stories are how Jesus taught us (in His parables). When we write questions for medical students’ tests, the stem is a “case based scenario”…that’s called a story, my friend. The person, the feelings, the scene. The context. The story is where the lesson is learned because we can place ourselves in it. And if we can feel the feels of the story…then we can learn the lessons of the story.

And this brings me to the tragedy of ignoring the story. When we read each others’ lives as 140 characters or a filtered photo, we don’t hear the story. We can’t get to know the hero or the protagonist, or see the setting or feel the conflict, the emotion, the tension, and the resolution. We need stories. Perhaps we feel so connected because we can click on our loved ones’ profile, but we feel so alone because we aren’t hearing the whole story. One freeze frame on a cell phone screen is not a story…

There are some hashtags being tossed around in my sphere of influence these days….I’ll just leave it at that. And while I want deeply to defend those who are my friends, I want to support the noble causes, I want to defend what I believe in….I am worried that hashtags and handles and pages and memes are hurting us more than helping us. Because we don’t really need to read another curated photo caption while the real story goes untold. There is a broken, raw, hurting, lonely, scared, intriguing, thrilling story behind each person, on each side, of the political chasm we are widening by the Tweet.

Friends, I think the reconciliation lies in listening. I think the winners are the ones who listen most intently, not Tweet/Post most indignantly. We all have a story to tell, and until we slow down and quiet ourselves enough listen to the stories, I believe we are moving further and further away from the common ground we all keep saying we desire. I bet we would be surprised and humbled to hear each others’ stories and see just how truly the same we are. So, friend, you pull up a chair and I’ll pour the coffee. Tell me a story. Your story. I’m listening…

 

Disclaimer: My viewpoints are not necessarily reflective of my employer, or any local, regional or national organization that I belong to. As a matter of fact, I pretty much just speak for myself. Please keep that in mind.