Everyone has a Story to Tell

Few people ever walk into the counseling office carrying a list. They walk in carrying a story — usually a hard one, usually half-told. A marriage that was supposed to work. A calling that was supposed to feel different. A family that was supposed to stay close across an ocean. We do not experience ourselves as bullet points; we experience ourselves as characters in the middle of something.

I have spent more than two decades in behavioral health — many of those years in public mental health, and the past ten in a church counseling center where much of my work is with missionaries and their families navigating the strange grief of moving between worlds. Across all of it, one conviction has grown stronger: everyone has a story to tell, and most of the healing I have witnessed begins the moment someone finally gets to tell theirs — all of it, out loud, to someone who stays and listens.

I did not arrive at this conviction through a book. I arrived at it by sitting in rooms. In my public mental health years, I sat with people whose files were inches thick — diagnoses, treatment plans, discharge summaries — all of it accurate and none of it adequate. The file told you what a person had, never who they were. When someone finally trusted me enough to tell the story underneath the file, the relationship changed. So did the approach.

Years later, sitting with those serving cross-culturally, I saw the same thing from a different angle. A family returns from the field carrying experiences their friends cannot imagine and their sending church does not know how to ask about. What they need first is not a workshop or a worksheet. They need someone to sit with them long enough for the story to come out in order — what happened, what it meant, what was lost, what was gained. Debriefing, at its heart, is simply the discipline of making room for a story to be told well. Everything I have built since — the books, the card deck, the debriefing apps, the journal — grew out of those stories. My own life is much the same: not a résumé of positions held, but a story with chapters I did not choose, transitions I would not have written, and a thread of grace I can only see looking backward. That noticing changed how I read Scripture, how I counsel, and eventually how I write.

For years I handed people what every counselor does — checklists, insights, sessions distilled to a single page. Accurate, well-organized, and mostly, I suspect, folded in a car console, because a bullet point does not follow you home. So I began rewriting them as narrative — not lists to review, but scenes to inhabit, pages describing a person growing, struggling, listening, following, just like the reader. A list tells you what to do. A story shows you who you could be while you are doing it. The four invitations (in my book "Whatever is True") underneath everything I write and practice — Aware, Truth, Identity, Abide — were never meant to be a diagram. They are a path someone walks.

Whatever brought you to this page, you are carrying a story too, and some of it is probably still untold — the chapter you skip when people ask how you are. Untold stories do not stay quiet. They blend into our bodies, our marriages, our two-in-the-morning thoughts. Told stories — told slowly, to someone safe, in the presence of God — have a way of being re-told. The facts do not change, but the meaning does. What felt like abandonment becomes, in the retelling, a chapter grace was writing all along.

So find your listener — a counselor, a wise friend, a debriefing companion, a journal if that is where you are more comfortable. Tell it in order. Tell what it meant, not just what happened. And if you are the listener for someone else, resist the urge to hand them a summary. Make room. Ask the next question. Stay present.

We are not changed by what we can recite. We are changed by what we can inhabit — and by what, at long last, we are finally able to tell. Everyone has a story. This has been some of mine; the fuller journey is told in my books and in the posts on this site.