Rewriting OUr Scripts by Abraham Cho

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

The instant we step out of our homes and put our feet down onto the sidewalk, we are swept up into a powerful and deep story. It is like stepping into the current of a mighty river. Our feet get pulled along by the undertow of a constantly moving, even if subconscious, narrative. And it is a complex, layered narrative: the narrative of our city or place, the narrative of our culture, the narrative of our family of origin, the narrative of our own personal struggles and triumphs. It is the narrative we have been using to make sense of our lives, especially in moments when we feel discouraged, defeated, or unsure.

Perhaps most importantly, this narrative often remains invisible to our conscious mind. This means that we can, for example, go to church or attend a Christian conference or participate in Bible study and give attention to, be moved by, and hold fervently to a particular set of conscious beliefs about our lives—yet those beliefs, however earnestly held, can leave the deep narrative river of our soul essentially unchanged. And so the moment we step back onto the flow of the sidewalk, we are pulled back into the striving energy of our default story. Genuine Christian discipleship is essentially seeking to reshape the narrative of this deep story—redirecting the undertow of our souls—with the story of the gospel. To do so, we need to start by excavating our deep stories.

So what are some of the deep stories we tell ourselves? What is that subterranean river, relentlessly powerful yet often unseen? For some, that story might be a version of the American Dream story. It goes something like this: “I grew up in a family that didn’t have a lot. But through hard work, grit, and resilience, I’ve been able to work my way up in the world, and now I’ve become relatively successful and satisfied.” Some version of that story may well be the one we tell ourselves when we’re discouraged, overwhelmed, or self-doubting. We most often pull out these scripts when we need to reassure ourselves that we are going to be okay. But whether in times of vulnerability or times of great triumph, this might be the story we are using to make sense of our lives.

For others, that story does not quite ring true. You might be more of a creative type and your story might sound something more like this: “I grew up in a very conservative home with a lot of traditional values and expectations. I was always a bit of an oddball in my family, and I felt very confined and even a little suppressed. I never really felt I could fully be myself. So I left my home, and I came to the city to discover who I am, to tap into the creativity and uniqueness that is inside there somewhere and offer it to the world.”

Or, you might be more like me and tell more of an underdog or outsider’s story: “I’ve always felt like the deck has been stacked against me. There have always been all kinds of forces set against me. I’ve had to overcome obstacles that others never had to deal with. I have always felt like I’m on the outside looking in. But I worked harder, I sacrificed more, I had to be twice as good as my peers just to get noticed, and I’ve been able to make my own way where there was no way.”

It would be a powerful exercise to pause right now and to try to excavate even just a part of the story that each of us tells ourselves. It may not be one of the stories shared here, but there is some story in there that is quietly pulling each of us along through life. Remember that sometimes the edges of our story become most visible to us in times of deep discouragement and disorientation—the moments when we feel like we have lost the plot in the story of our life. Excavating is hard, backbreaking work, but if we are not at least growing in our awareness of these deep, controlling scripts, Christian faith and belief will never really be more than just flotsam and jetsam—fragments of conscious belief, floating on the surface, carried along by the driving currents of our deeper idolatries.

So, once we identify that subterranean river, how do we redirect it?

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