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Everyone has a story. You are your story as I am mine. In sharing them we tell the truth of who we believe we are. Speaking our truth allows us to trace the hand of God, discovering and then declaring His faithfulness, as he interfaces with us in our fragile human experience.

I had a typical life in many ways. I was born into a Christian home. From the moment I drew my first breath, I was immersed in the life of the church: faith has always been part of my life. I have been happily married for thirty years and after raising four sons, Alan and I are now enjoying this season of our lives as empty nesters. I share my life as a peer mentor, work and volunteer part time at a therapeutic community and spend hours reading, writing and gardening. I am surrounded with lots of wild and wonderful friends.

That is the true story of my life, the neat and tidy version. But in between each sentence are cracks. Beneath them lay huge chasms where the real story is wedged, hidden, out of sight.

A few years ago, I witnessed a crime and had to go to court. After taking the stand, and placing my hand on the Bible the clerk said, “Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

It struck me that when we are called to give our testimony the first part is simple: we tell the truth, we don’t lie. The last part is equally straight forward: we don’t add on or elaborate. But by far the most challenging piece is being faithful to the middle: telling the whole truth. And to tell the truth even half right we need God’s help.

But why bother to tell the truth of our lives at all, especially the messy parts?

“You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free”. These ancient words attributed to Jesus echo through the ages and resound in our hearts. Sharing my truth with you allows me to live more fully in that freedom and opens the possibility that you too will be set free to do a bit of storytelling of your own, if only to yourself.

Telling truthful stories can be tricky. One difficulty we have when we set out to tell our story is we all come into awareness about our lives part way through. Our formative years—the critical period where our young soul is shaped, our beliefs are indelibly etched on our hearts and our genetic code is being tweaked—begin long before we are able to use words to create a tale. Children record pictures in their mind and store experiences in their bodies as feelings. They are taught to interpret those images and sensations by those around them. The stories we believe to be true shape us and become the narrative we live out of.

As children, our stories are often captured as photographs. Both literally and figuratively, our parents take snapshots through their lens, frame it from their perspective and then hand us a photoshopped version telling us the story. Their reality, our family’s version, is the one we are taught to believe is true. What becomes challenging is when our memories—the movies in our mind, the emotions embedded in our cells—don’t match the still frame sitting upon the mantle in our childhood home, and the rhetoric accompanying that shot caught on canvas.

Telling the truth, our account of the story can be risky. If, as a child, our tale fails to match the family story, we are often first corrected. If we persist on giving our rendition, we are said to be confused, lying or completely crazy. As children, we often stop telling our story altogether and force ourselves to live another’s version of our experience. Living in untruth keeps us bound and gagged, squishing out life. We can’t breathe.

Coming to understand my family of origin and how growing up within it shaped my life has been much like gathering a handful of confetti after it has been tossed in the air and blown by wind then trying to tidily arrange those tiny round circles and fit them into the sheets of paper from which they were cut. If I were to take those million little pieces and make them into a perfect square, creating a story with a smooth narrative arc, I most certainly would be accused of writing fiction rather than a memoir. It would require tampering with truth, something I am not prepared to do. I have tried to tell my story truthfully. Some of the tales have jagged edges and hang awkwardly in my book because they remain perched unsupported in my child’s mind.

But perhaps neither my story nor the one first told by my family is most important. The real story, the one that matters, the tale I need to learn to tell, is the truest, most freedom-filled story of all, a God-breathed story, the story of who He says I am.

Epicentre

I was fifteen when I ran away from home. I ran away for the same reasons most kids do: because I was hurt and angry, but most of all sad. It was dark and pouring with rain as I turned the corner of the street where I lived, a busy corridor that runs east to west in the High Park area of Toronto, and headed up Laws Street toward Dundas Avenue. I really didn’t know where I was going, just away, as far away as I could run. The pulsing of my heart grew stronger in my head, the rhythmic thumping drowning all noise, inside and out. The faster I ran, the less I could think, the less I could feel. I struggled forward, hunched over by the ache in my side, staccato gasps sucking in icy air, stinging my lungs.

I was picked up by a police officer who flashed his lights, whirled the siren and demanded I get into his cruiser. At first, when he asked my name, I didn’t answer. Instead, looking straight ahead, I watched the windshield wipers go back and forth, cradling my thoughts, lulling them asleep. Twisting my fist into my side, I tried to work out the knot in my tight gut. Then, inhaling deeply, I held my breath to keep the tears inside where they belonged.

He probably wasn’t used to being ignored, especially by a scrawny teenage girl who had taken off just before midnight. He told me if I didn’t tell him my name and address he would have to take me to juvenile hall. I turned and looked at him. I don’t know if I was more mad or sad but I was definitely scared. It frightened me enough to tell him who I was and when I told him where I lived, he laughed.

It really wasn’t funny. I did live at a boys’ Group Home. It was the same one he and many of his cronies had paid countless visits to over the previous months. My mom and dad were the Group Home parents and that is where I lived—me and eight juvenile delinquent boys: just one big unhappy family.

He took me home and when my mom finally answered the door it was obvious she had been asleep. Oh, she knew I had gone out all right. She had tried to stop me, grabbing the back of my jacket as I slithered out of it to break free, bolting into the cold October night. I guess she was tired because she had just returned that evening from a six week vacation. Calling a trip to visit my brother and his wife in Michigan a vacation may be harsh, but she did vacate. The Group Home, where we lived and where she had worked that last year, had taken its toll. She was exhausted. So one day, weary of it all, my mom booked a flight. She told me she was off to see Wayne and didn’t know when she would return but it would be after my birthday, which hurt my feelings. By then my feelings were getting hurt on such a regular basis and I was sick of hearing how sensitive I was so I pretended not to feel, especially not to feel hurt. I secretly thought she wasn’t coming home. I knew that if I were her and had a one-way ticket to anywhere in the world I wouldn’t come back. I would vacate permanently. And that’s what I did. I disappeared inside. I became vacant.