Once Upon a Time: Discovering Our Forever After Story

by Macomber, Debbie

  YOUR OWN GRAND STORY

  I’ve come to realize that God wants us to see our lives in terms of story—from an eternal perspective. Trouble is on the horizon—it’s always there in one form or another—but we have nothing to fear because redemption is on the way. Or, as you’ve seen written on T-shirts, “Please be patient, God is not finished with me yet.”

  As we explore ways to see our lives as one grand story, we’re going to realize that all the parts—the good parts and the bad, the trouble and the heartache, the disappointments and the discouragements we face—are important to the story, and, as we already know, redemption is coming!

  GATHERING THE STORY TOGETHER

  Remember the scene in the movie Out of Africa where Karen Blixen’s native majordomo, Kamante, inquires about the stack of manuscript pages she has on her worktable? She tells him it is her book. He points to the manuscript. “This is not a book.” Kamante goes to the bookshelf and takes out a book. “This is a book,” he says patiently. He turns the book upside down. “See, this pages don’t fall out.” He puts his hand on the stack of loose pages and asks how she will make “this pages” into a book.

  He is asking an age-old question, really. What do we do with our story, with all these stories we are gathering? I’ll have to admit, I’m a little uncomfortable bringing up the subject of journals. Someone pointed out once that I have talked about journals and journaling in every single one of the nonfiction books I’ve written. I can’t help myself. I’m a writer. A storyteller. If we are going to collect stories, we need to have some way to keep them and to pass them on. We can’t rely on our memories. Those are too fleeting. I am so grateful for the journals I’ve written through the years. They are my legacy to my children, my day-to-day ramblings about my life, my dreams, my hopes, and my happenings.

  If we are going to live intentionally—if we are going to pay attention—we need to capture ideas and stories in some way. The easiest way is, of course, journals. Just get a blank book or even a writing tablet. Aside from the diary I kept as a child, my earliest journal, when our family was young, was a spiral-bound notebook. It was all we could afford. Your own need not be fancy. What’s important is that you begin to write down everything you remember and collect. For the last few years I’ve used my journal sort of like a collection tool—a scrapbook—for letters or special birthday cards, announcements, or newspaper articles. You can organize your journal any way you like. Develop your own system, but, in the meantime, just begin to capture the everyday details of your life and write them down.

  I have the journal my mother kept during World War II while my father was overseas. It was one of those five-year ones, with only a few lines for each day. It amazes me how much my mother was able to say with a few short sentences. Mom and Dad were married just before my father shipped overseas. Two days after the wedding ceremony my father was on a troop carrier taking him to England. One of my favorite entries is from the day Dad had roses delivered to Mom for their anniversary. I’m certain he involved his youngest sister, my aunt Gerty, in this. The entry in Mom’s diary says: Roses from Ted. Oh, my heart.

  Six simple words that say so much.

  Madeleine L’Engle called her journal a “commonplace book.” It was a big brown Mexican leather notebook. She copied words that caught her fancy, passages from books, quotes, and sayings. She said, “All I’m looking for in it is meaning, meaning which will help me live life lovingly.”3

  You might not be a paper-and-ink sort of person. You may be more comfortable creating a journal on your computer. There are many apps and software programs available for this very purpose.

  Like Madeleine L’Engle, I also write down quotes and sayings that attract my attention. I keep those in my Gratitude Journal. (Yes, I keep more than one journal. What can I say? It’s the writer in me.)

  Something else from Madeleine L’Engle—she said, “When I have a profound personal experience, I write it down in my journal and that way I am working through it. To some extent, I am objectifying it. It is no longer just subjective. But I’m also setting it in my memory. If you want to put it in a novel or a book, it does have to wait. It’s very important to set down what you’re feeling while it’s happening.”4

  The important thing is to write it down. Don’t worry about “doing it right” or about grammar or about writing a memoir that will hit the New York Times best-seller list. Just get the descriptions and stories down in your own words.

  Trust your voice.

  Trust your stories.

  HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

  In writing this book, I’m not suggesting everyone needs to pen his or her own memoir or record his or her story for posterity. This is more about developing an awareness—a commitment to remembering. That’s not to say I’m not going to encourage you to record your story in some way for your family or begin a journal or two. But I am going to look at the elements that make up a good story and ask you to think about the story God is writing with your life. One of my favorite quotes is from Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Look at your own life and my guess is that as you do, you will see God’s fingerprints, His loving, guiding hand upon you.

  So let’s dig in and start figuring out ways to examine our lives and tell our stories. Here are some ways you may want to explore your own story:

  • Telling your story in a group setting. After you read through this book, you may want to gather a group of friends or a women’s group at church or your reading club and go through the book together. I offer what I call storytelling prompts at the end of each chapter to help tickle your memories and offer something to chew on. These prompts make great conversation starters if you use this book in a group setting. (After all, there is nothing better for getting to know people than sharing stories.)

  • Telling your story through journaling. You might want to take a journal and use the storytelling prompts to begin to explore your own “once upon a time.” But don’t stop there. As I talk about story, apply my story and the stories of others in the book to your own life. What was your beginning? Who are the characters in your story? What unique challenges have you had to face? If you allow yourself to write freely, you’ll be surprised at the things you remember.

  • Telling your story through the arts. Some readers are not writers. Writing in a journal sounds like a school assignment to them. That’s okay. You might want to tell your story through the pages of a photo album or scrapbook. If so, get out your scissors and glue and begin to piece your own story together. If you are a quilter, there is a great tradition of storytelling quilts, like album quilts. We can be creative in how we tell our stories.

  • Telling your story out loud. Folktales and fairy stories all started out in the oral tradition—told around a fire. You may want to revive this storytelling tradition in your family. When we tell stories about ourselves to our families we forge the strongest link possible—shared history. I think it would be great fun to use the storytelling prompts at the end of each chapter as dinnertime conversation starters. If a child is allowed to tell his own story at the table, he will begin to see his life from a broader perspective. And, of course, it is important to let each story be told without correction or interruption. (We’ll talk more about quieting the critics later in the book.) Just think of the richness that awaits us if the table or the gathering holds many generations that can share stories together. Don’t forget, we pass along our values, generation to generation, through storytelling.

  • Telling your story through memoir. If you are interested in writing your own memoir, go for it! You’ll be leaving a treasure for your family.

  Shall we start?

  Once upon a time . . .

  Storytelling Prompt

  What is your “In the beginning” story as told to you by family? What is your own earliest memory?

  The Importance of Remembering

  Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as the author who wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
under the pen name Lewis Carroll, knew the importance of remembering. He was a pioneer photographer who spent hours staging artful images of the people in his life. He kept journals and wrote books—both math books and his delightful Alice stories for children. But one of the ways he marked his life was to designate never-to-be-forgotten days as “white stone days.” In his journals, he told about a particularly meaningful outing and then wrote, “Mark this day with a white stone.” To him this meant that he knew he would pass that way only once and he wanted to remember.

  Mark Batterson, the pastor of National Community Church in Washington DC, says in his book Soulprint, “Without memory, we’d have to relearn everything every day. Without memory, we’d forget who we are and where we’ve been. Without memory, we’d lose faith because we’d forget the faithfulness of God.”5

  Later in the book he says, “If you’re willing to do some personal archaeology, you’ll dig up some invaluable artifacts.” And he goes on to say, “Digging into your past can be emotionally exhausting, but remember, your destiny is hidden there. Pray for a spirit of revelation. Make sure you have a journal to record your thoughts. Start looking for those mysterious symbols that can be turned into lifesymbols.”6

  Deuteronomy 4:9 says, “Only be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them fade from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them.”

  Two

  IN A LAND FAR AWAY . . .

  Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me; your right hand will hold me fast.

  —PSALM 139:7–10

  When we open a book and read the words, “In a land far, far away . . .” we fasten our imaginary seat belts, because we know we’re going to find ourselves exploring a new world between the covers of the book. That line alone is capable of setting my heart to racing with eager anticipation.

  The setting of a book plays an important part in story. I believe that setting is a character in and of itself. If you’ve read Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, you’ll never forget that opening line, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Manderley was as much a character—a mysterious, haunting character—as Rebecca or Maxim de Winter. The same goes for Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

  Several years ago, I sat down to work out details for a new series of books I wanted to set in a small town that gave my readers a sense of coming home—a sense that they could live in this town and feel like a part of the community. The advice often given to writers is to write what you know. Over the course of my career, I’d written a number of books set in series. The first took place in Alaska, the second in Texas, and yet another in North Dakota, creating towns and populating them with characters my readers might well find in their own communities. However, before I wrote a single word, I visited each of those locations and read countless books so I had the flavor and the feel of the area. As my career moved forward, I found I was often on the road. It was time for a new series, and so I decided to create the fictional town of Cedar Cove, a thinly disguised version of my own hometown of Port Orchard, Washington, on the Kitsap Peninsula. I say thinly disguised because Cedar Cove has a library with a mural that bears a striking resemblance to Port Orchard’s library and mural. Imagine that! And the Pancake Palace looks an awful lot like Port Orchard’s own Family Pancake House. In fact, Cedar Cove’s famous D.D.’s on the Cove is reminiscent of the real Amy’s on the Bay, on the Port Orchard waterfront. And in Port Orchard there’s a marina, a park with a gazebo, and a totem pole, just like in the book. In fact, so much of Cedar Cove resembles Port Orchard that I published a map for the Chamber of Commerce to hand out to the hundreds of tourists who routinely stop by for a tour of our town. As the books gained popularity, readers came to Port Orchard to visit Amy’s on the Bay and the Family Pancake House and the other sites they had come to know from the books.

  Remember what I said earlier about the success of my career going above and beyond anything I could have dreamed? That has certainly been the case with my Cedar Cove series. Who would have imagined when I decided to set my new series in Port Orchard that the town would one day become a tourist destination? Certainly not I.

  As you can probably tell, I had fun creating this semifictional town. In all, I wrote twelve novels, plus two Christmas books and a novella, as part of the Cedar Cove series. Cedar Cove became known as “the town you’d love to call home.”

  As tourists started coming into town, the Chamber of Commerce took notice, and so did the town leaders and the city council. A group of business leaders and politicians came to me and suggested we stage an event—that we “open up the town” for readers. A committee formed, and in August of 2009 a five-day celebration dubbed Cedar Cove Days took place, with readers coming from forty-two states and seven foreign countries, all to celebrate a fictional town in a land far away.

  Readers love the Cedar Cove series. They love the feeling that comes over them when they reach for the next installment, because they know they are going to meet characters they have come to love in a location that makes them feel as if they are stepping out their own front door.

  My readers often asked me how many books would be in the series, and my response was always the same: I’ll stop when all the stories are told. When I felt I had reached that point, I came up with a new, exciting concept and announced the last book of Cedar Cove series, tying up all the loose ends and revisiting each family one last time.

  Oh my, I have to tell you, the outcry, the response to ending this set of stories—it took me completely by surprise. My mailbag began to swell. Readers weren’t ready to leave Cedar Cove. They seemed to be mourning the loss of the places and characters that were familiar—that had become a part of their lives. I remember receiving a letter from one of my readers when Olivia, the town judge, was diagnosed with breast cancer. The reader said she had started to pray for Olivia before she remembered Olivia was a fictional character.

  I wondered if they were so upset because at some point in our lives so many of us moved away from our families and hometowns—our roots—to follow jobs or spouses’ jobs. Maybe it was because we yearn for that town where we know all the people and they know us. Possibly it was just because we hate to come to the end of a story.

  Well, I’ve always listened to my readers. More than once, they have changed the course of my career. I wasn’t about to ignore them on this point. By the time you read this, the first book in my new series, The Inn at Rose Harbor, will have been published, and I’ve plotted the second. And where did I decide to set this wonderful inn? The bed-and-breakfast that is the centerpiece of the Rose Harbor series is set right in the middle of Cedar Cove. (And the Inn at Rose Harbor somehow looks an awful lot like Port Orchard’s Cedar Cove Inn.)

  LONGING FOR A PLACE

  There’s something we discover about ourselves in the places we come to love, even if they are places from fiction or from our own imaginations. C. S. Lewis, in his book Surprised by Joy, described how a longing for place—for a setting—was an early clue to his nature. Here he’s talking about one of the first glimpses of that longing for something he couldn’t yet describe:

  This absence of beauty, now that I come to think of it, is characteristic of our childhood. Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin, which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew. What the real garden had failed to do, the toy garden did. It made me aware of nature—not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant. I do not think the impression was very important at the moment, but it soon became important in memory. As long as I live my imagination of
Paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden.1

  And a little further along in the book, he reprises that memory, that little garden:

  The first is itself the memory of a memory. As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me.2

  When C. S. Lewis wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, that toy garden, that longing for something he couldn’t describe, became the land of Narnia—a setting that has touched the imaginations of children ever since.

  Sometimes our longing for a certain place—or, as in Lewis’s case, a longing for a deep, otherworldly beauty—is a clue God gives us about who we are and what we are called to do.

  REVISITING HOME

  Many classic settings have become legendary—some fictional, some real. How about Anne of Green Gables’s Prince Edward Island? Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon? Scarlett O’Hara’s Tara? When I say Narnia or Middle Earth, doesn’t it conjure up a picture? How about Pemberley? Or The Secret Garden?

  Or what about our own settings? In the first chapter I talked about Yakima and the library I loved in my hometown. A big part of who I am today was shaped by my hometown.

  Every year I host what we call Grandma Camp. It’s a time I set aside to spend with my granddaughters doing something fun and different and new. Last summer my three granddaughters and I held Grandma Camp in Yakima, Washington, the town where I was born and raised, where I lived the first seventeen years of my life. I showed them the hospital where I was born (it has a new name now) and the house where I grew up (new owners, of course). The house where Mom and Dad lived when I was born burned to the ground in the late 1950s. We visited the church where my husband and I were married (the priest who married us has since left the priesthood). We also stopped where my high school once stood (St. Joseph Academy, now, sadly, is a parking lot). I showed them the building where my father made and reupholstered furniture. It really brought home how much time changes everything.