What Luke Skywalker and Frodo Have in Common with Sickness Stories
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Receiving a cancer diagnosis is challenging. Finding the words to stutter out a new chapter in your story is also difficult. In our culture of fitness and wellness, what important things does a sick person have to say? Are there keys to communicating your sickness story so people will listen? I believe there are. And what do Luke Skywalker and Frodo Baggins have to teach us about sickness anyway? Today we will talk about the third way we tell our stories: Quest Storytelling.A quest. A journey. A sojourn.Everyone longs for such an adventure, where new things are discovered and the unlikely hero overcomes challenges to return to help others with the knowledge he has gained on his journey.
While facing evil and danger on every side, Frodo claws his way to Mordor, destroys the ring, and he returns to the Shire, a place of peace and tranquility because of his actions.
Jonah does everything possible to resist the call to adventure, gets swallowed by a whale, has an encounter with God, gets vomited out, and preaches to the Ninevites who repent and turn to God.
Luke Skywalker lives in obscurity with his aunt and uncle, receives the call to adventure via a droid about a princess in trouble, encounters many difficulties, yet is able to destroy the Death Star and continue his life as a Jedi.
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Quest Storytelling is built into the very framework of our culture, our movies, and our narratives. Yet, it is one thing to watch a journey on a screen, it is quite another to live out the sentences in the pages of our lives through the halls of sickness and in chemo rooms. Quest Storytelling demands that we ask the question "why" and look suffering straight in the face--a skill few of us have acquired or desire in our world of health, youth, and fitness.We are much more comfortable living out Take Back Storytelling that sees sickness as temporary or even Chaos Storytelling which we speak in the turmoil of a new diagnosis or after an unexpected turn in treatment. Quest Storytelling may take months or even years to acquire, yet almost every cancer survivor I know expresses a form of Quest Storytelling.
"I wouldn't have chosen cancer, but the people I have met and the lessons I have learned made it worth it."
"I am a better person because of having cancer."
"Cancer taught me to take nothing for granted and to enjoy each day."
I have a medallion from my dad that has a picture of a bird in flight on one side and on the other, these words:
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Quest Storytelling.
The message on the medallion echoes two things we as listeners of Quest Storytelling want to hear:
The teller of the story had a change of character in spite of the suffering. (He learned to stand.)
The teller has wisdom to offer us when we face our own journeys. (There is help out there to do the impossible - fly.)
We need words of hope. We need testimonies of beauty. We need encounters with faith. We need examples of strength.We want to discover those rewards in our own illness journeys and we want to hear it in the voices of others.Quest Storytelling provides both.What wisdom do you have to offer others on their illness journey?Do you feel you learned important lessons or became a better person because of your illness?How did you learn to stand and how did you learn to fly?Other Posts in the Series:
Take Back Storytelling: Today I am Sick But Tomorrow I Will Be Better
What Luke Skywalker and Frodo Have in Common with Sickness Stories (that's this post!)
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