On page 137 in his book The Clown in the Belfry, Frederick Buechner writes:

“In the long run the stories all overlap and mingle like searchlights in the dark… In other words all our stories are in the end one story, one vast story about being human, being together, being here. Does the story point beyond itself? Does it mean something? What is the truth of this interminable, sprawling story we all of us are? Or is it as absurd to ask about the truth of it as it is to ask about the truth of the wind howling through a crack under the door?”

From first hand experience I know something about the truth of the wind howling through a crack under the door. And I think I know something about telling a story, my story, but then again I’m not so sure about that.

I post pictures and write about my life as a post-pastor and present hack-carpenter. I tell a story about remodeling an old house. But the story Life as a House has already been told and even made into a movie. And I would guess there are a thousand or more similar stories already recorded. So why bother? I tell the story because I need to try and figure it out for myself.

Rising early while it is still dark, pulling on a pair of well worn Carharts, lacing up old work boots, stoking the fire in the shop and then walking the perimeter of a rather small city lot and thinking through projects in progress, few completed and much yet to do is a rather boring story line. No guns, no grizzlies, no wild pick-up rides through open country ever pop up in my journal. For a taste of these Montana stories I need to turn the pages of the morning edition of the Independent Record that is dropped early at the front door. By contrast, my story is rather slow.

Slow or go I write in my blog not for show but for myself. I jot down a few words or post a picture and it is enough to wet my appetite for a retelling of other stories. In my mind the story takes off and runs back in time to a childhood home in Minnesota or much farther back to a time of parents and grandparents that I never knew. In my imagination I fill in the paragraphs and details of what might have been or what could have been and I tell myself a story, made up for my own pleasure, of how my parents must have worked long nights and through the weekends to build their home in Golden Valley. I imagine the fantasy of grandfather Per farming the rocky land and building barns and remodeling an already ancient house into a place called home for he and Emilie and then after her premature death, for his young bride Julia. Theirs was a home of toil and hardship in old Sweden but for me the pictures are bright and quaint and so I paint and patch and attempt to make this Helena home a Sweden House. It comforts me deeply. Just an illusion perhaps but it makes me to feel more in touch with stories past. In the end I suppose Buechner is right, all of our stories are in the end just one story told over and over. A human story. A story of home and family and work and pleasure.