There is a great Shakespearean quote from one of my favorite war flicks, “To End All Wars.” Released 2001, starting Robert Carlyle and Kiefer Sutherland. Based on a real-life story of Allied soldiers in Burma who were held captive by the Japanese several years before the ending of World War II.
During a touching and dramatic scene prior to their rescue, when all hope had been beaten out of the POWs, American B-24 bombers flew over the prison camp. Suddenly, like large fluttering snowflakes, hundreds of leaflets from the Allied forces decended down onto the camp.
On each of the leaflets held a message of hope and liberation, announcing the end of the war and the impending arrival of Allied forces. The reaction of the Japanese soldiers was to immediately abandon the camp and retreat into the jungle.
The POWs bewildered, as their captors fled, being severely weakened from malnutrition and abuse, couldn’t believe what was happening. As the significance of the moment dawned on the terribly broken men, a fellow POW began quoting the following:
“For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition from this day to the ending of the world. But we in it shall be remembered; We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” –Henry V Act 4, Scene 3, St. Crispin’s Day
I want you to know that while you may be suffering alone; confused, bewildered, dried up on the inside, and losing hope, your rescue is coming. You are not alone! While we’re not all held captive together in a prison camp, we are all together in spirit. Each tear we silently shed is our “bleeding.” It is what binds us together beyond space and time. It’s what makes us brothers and sisters. We all have our own stories as to how we’ve become broken, abused, and imprisoned. Your story does matter and is critically important!
It’s in the remembering and the telling of your story that could change everything — It did for me.
In the 2007 movie: “Reign Over Me,” starring, Adam Sandler as Charlie Finemen, a man who was completely lost because of the horrific and sudden death of his beloved wife, Doreen, and his three little daughters, Geena, Jenny, and Julie, in one of the doomed hijacked planes of 911.
Charlie runs into his old friend, Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle). The two had shared a dorm room while at a dental school, for two years, and now, nearly five years later, and having lost touch with one another, they bumped into each other by chance, on a street corner in New York.
Alan Johnson, surprised at Charlie’s state of grief and lost-ness, tries to help his old friend recover. He ends up getting Charlie to see his therapist friend, Angela Oakhurst (Liv Tyler).
Charlie finally consents to see the therapist. Charlie seems not to be listening to Angela’s recommendations and asks if his counseling secession could be over. Angela consents and says:
“If you want it to be, Charlie.”
So, Charlie gets up from the sofa and is nearly out of Angela’s office when he is stopped by her. She gives him one last piece of advice:
“Charlie, before you go, I’d like to say something. Look, the fact is you had a family and you suffered a great loss, and until you discuss that and we can really talk about that, this is all just an exercise. I can be patient, Charlie, but you need to tell someone your story. It doesn’t have to be me, but someone.”
Charlie did begin to tell his story to his friend, Alan Johnson. Although painful, it began the recovery of a long battle with grief and loss, whereby through this tragedy, he had developed PTSD.
I strongly encourage you to find someone to tell your story to a therapist, friend, pastor, priest, or rabbi. If not, reach for pen and paper and begin your own memoir. As you may eventually discover, your own story is worth telling, and suddenly, your desert may turn into an oasis.
It’s never too late to start. I started writing my story at age fifty-four. The writing and telling of my story have given me a greater understanding and clarity that I did not have before I began to write.
Author and speaker John Eldredge responded in an interviewer when asked the following question:
Interviewer:
“Why is it so important for us to view our lives as a story?”
John Eldredge:
“We’ve tried to sort and solve our confusion with tips and techniques, principles — a truth here — a proposition there, but it doesn’t really work. I’m suggesting that we’ll get a whole lot farther down the road to clarity and understanding if we look at things through the lens of story.”
I had, tried all the empty “tips and techniques, principles; a truth here or a proposition there,” and have found that these things may offer some relief, but do not take us as far as we need to go in our journey. It is the telling or writing of your story and, as Mr. Eldredge has suggested, looking at your life and, “all things through the lens of a story.”
I have written my story in many articles that I have posted and published. They are all my jewels and pearls of life. It is my sincere hope that I’ve spread them before the needy, the brokenhearted; those in dungeons of despair and those imprisoned with guilt, and not to those who would cheapen them — who would embellish themselves upon my misery and that of others. But even so, to such people, I bid you come, and take what you want, for the greatest of my treasures lay not in Wall Street, or on Main Street, but in heaven.
I encourage you to consider your life as a “story”. It contains all the chapters of your life, with good days and bad days. With chapters of pain and agony and pages of suffering, chapters of recovery and joy and pages of contentment. Your story is made up of all your events of life and when you are brave enough to take a peek, you may begin to see there has been an Author all along, doing something in you through each and every chapter of your life.
And even though, at least so far, this has been a short version of my story and journey from severe child abuse and the development of PTSD early in my life, there has been and remains an Author and Artist throughout all the years of my life.
God has intricately woven and written my story, using all the chaos and heartache, loss and pain, seasons of happiness and great joy, months of loneliness and despair, years of poverty and wealth — the list goes on and on.
For nearly sixty-six years now, nothing in life or in the dying has changed this one important truth:
Christ is our only answer and our only hope!
Turn to Him, who is well acquainted with grief and sorrow. He bore it all, not for title or position, but that He may become a Savior worth trusting and a Lamb to gentle your condition.
Begin your journey of hope and healing and call out to the Abba of Jesus. He is the end of your search for hope and healing and the cure for your hurting heart and soul.
Trusting Him may just begin a new and beautiful story.
This can be your liberation day — This could be the day that your war ends.
Go and write your story!
Call To Courage 