by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words

A couple of years ago, I was in another city that I’ve visited many times over the years. It was Sunday morning, and I was walking into a church which I’ve also visited a good many times. As you probably know, most churches have greeters standing at the door of the sanctuary to welcome people and, often, they’re handing out liturgy bulletins and such. On this particular morning, I saw that one of the greeters was someone I knew. Now, it had been several years since I’d seen them, but they’re a songwriter whose work I admire and follow online. In fact, about a decade prior, some friends and I had even organized a small writer’s retreat with them.  

Let me stop for a moment just to say that everything I’m describing took place in a few seconds and most of it entirely in my head. 

As I walked up to the sanctuary door, something in me interpreted the whole scene in a split second. Here’s the interpretation: “This songwriter you admire doesn’t know who you are, so when you walk up and he hands you a church bulletin, just say thanks and move on. You remember him, but, to him, you don’t have a name or any particular meaning.”  

Okay, so that’s the narration in my head, if I were to put it into words. I should say that it didn’t initially come in words—it was more of a sense, like something I just assumed to be the case. At any rate, it wasn’t an unreasonable or even bothersome narration. It seemed more or less plain and factual. So, I acted accordingly. I walked up to take the bulletin with the intuitive assumption that this guy had no idea who I was, wouldn’t remember me, and it wasn’t a big deal.  

Can you guess what happened next?  

As I approached, he smiled and said, “Hey, Matthew! It’s been a long time. Great to see you here!” 

How about that? It turns out he did remember me. He even remembered my name. What’s more he even seemed genuinely glad to see me. But the surprises don’t stop there! Here’s what he said next, “Hey, next time you’re in town, shoot me a text, I’d love to get lunch and catch up with you.”  

Well, that was just about too much. Not only did he correctly identify me. Not only did he fail to express displeasure at my sudden appearance, seeming glad instead, but he actually wanted to hangout. My internal narrator had completely dropped the ball on every single point and failed to prepare me at all for a whole bunch of unexpected good. 

How about another example? I’ve got an embarrassing amount of these stories in my back pocket. For instance, once I was at a conference reaching for the door handle of the room I was about to enter—the noisy bustle of people all around me—when I heard a voice say, “Matthew Clark you can’t go in there!” I stopped in my tracks and looked around for a face to match the voice. It was yet another person, who like the fellow in the previous story, I would have thought maybe wouldn’t remember me. We had a quick, friendly conversation for a minute before we both continued with what we’d been doing.  

But, I have to admit that after that little meeting, I noticed the same sense of incredulity that I’d felt at the door of the sanctuary when that songwriter I admired greeted me with such warmth and connection. I felt surprised that the voice who said my name from the busy crowd would even think to say anything to me at all. My internal narrator was really falling down on the job of aligning my internal sense of things with actual reality. 

Would you like another story like this? Of course you do. Why not? So, there was another time that I showed up a little late to a party that I felt a little surprised to even be invited to. I’d arrived by myself and most everyone else seemed to have already found a conversational groove or grouped off into a comfortable corner of the room to chat with someone, and so forth. I, on the other hand, had just stepped into the room and was searching for something or someone familiar with whom I might connect. I was feeling a little bit disjointed, honestly, when suddenly a hand clapped me on the shoulder from behind, and a voice said, “Matthew! Hey man, glad you made it to the party, follow me real quick.”  Before I knew it I was following this fellow through the twists and turns of the kitchen, a hallway or two, and finally into a little storage room where he produced a bottle of fancy whiskey and a few glasses—one for me, one for him, and one to be delivered to another friend elsewhere.  

But here’s the thing, I was whisked up into this unexpected whiskey-run by someone who, two minutes earlier, my internal narrator was assuring me couldn’t possibly have any interest in me. But this guy was, in fact, one of the hosts of the party. Now, here we were on a mission together, which was followed by another half-hour of good conversation. He’d made a way for me to find a place in the life of that gathering. Or, I should say, he proved me wrong with regard to my essentially automatic assumption that I had no place in that gathering.  

That’s three strikes against my internal narrator. Seems like the little storyteller that lives in my head is, more often than not, pretty out of touch with reality in a discouraging way. 

Hmm. I was beginning to think the automatic narrative I was being fed might not be all that reliable. I could tell you more stories. 

Something I have noticed with myself is that there is a little narrator living in my head who tells stories that aren’t true. And maybe the worst part is that this narrator’s voice has become so normal and familiar that I just take what it says for granted. Things like, “nobody knows your name” “you’re forgettable” “no one is glad you’re here” and so on. When stories like that get familiar enough, they don’t even necessarily feel all that painful or disturbing. What’s the right word for it? They feel like common sense. Nothing to get bent out of shape about, it’s just the way things are, and you adjust appropriately, right?  

A few years ago, I read a book by Katherine Paterson called, “Jacob have I loved.” It follows the growing up years of a girl nick-named Wheezy in New England, who is the story’s narrator. I don’t want to ruin the book for you, but sometimes the experience of reading a story can actually create within you something like a lived experience of that story’s meaning. What I mean is, as I read Wheezy’s narration of her life, I didn’t just see it as interesting information, I felt it as if it were real. The best stories aren’t just things we’ve read, they’re things that “happen” to us. 

Wheezy narrates the ways in which her prettier twin sister is favored by everyone, how her own desires, looks, and personality are not received or handled well by her family. And for most of the book, I was frustrated right along with her. But at some point, as Wheezy was narrating one of her many misfortunes, I sat up with a sudden realization and slapped the book down in my lap. Wheezy had been interpreting someone else’s reaction to herself, but I knew enough about that other character by now to know Wheezy’s interpretation was wrong. That’s when it dawned on me that Wheezy was an unreliable narrator. This is a book about someone misreading her own life. By the end of the story, something happens that sheds light backwards across the narrative and Wheezy begins to see it for herself. She’d been wrong all these years. Go grab a copy of “Jacob have I loved” by Katherine Paterson, and see what you think. I won’t say more for fear of spoiling it.  

That book, though, and the experience of feeling that story so deeply in my own heart, brought about an important realization for me. I was a lot like Wheezy. I am an unreliable narrator with regard to myself and my own story. I have a regular enough habit of jumping to sad conclusions about myself and the way things are, and more often than not, those conclusions, common sensical as they seem, simply don’t correspond to reality.  I have an unreliable narrator that lives in my head—one who has a bad habit of telling sad stories that just aren’t true.  

These days, when some sad script begins to play out in my mind as if it were inevitable, I can say to that mopey fellow slumped over his keyboard, “Hey buddy, hold off on publishing that, let’s just wait and see what happens instead.”  

Sometimes it takes more courage than other times, especially since that narrator is most likely trying his best to protect against some old and very real hurt being repeated. I can appreciate that. Still, here, in the land of the living, I’ve been surprised to see the goodness of the Lord and the love of the people around me enough times to push pause on that unreliable narrator. Sometimes, when I do, the scene changes pretty dramatically, and the face I’d been expecting to scowl or look past me, turns towards me, smiles, and says my name, almost as if love had kept a little place for it in their heart, after all. 

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