How we tell the stories of our lives, and why the telling matters
“The second son he named Ephraim and said, ‘It is because God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering.’”
— Genesis 41:52In Session 6 you sat in eighteen minutes of silence with a sheet in front of you: a navy column on the left, a gold column on the right, and a white band across the bottom. You were asked to find a turn where something good soured, a turn where something hard grew into something good, and the thread beneath both. In the room, those were two plain words and a pen. This essay tells the longer story behind them: where the words come from, what the research found, what Scripture adds, and how to use them when you touch up §1.1 this week. You don’t need any of it to do the Charter work well. It’s here if something in the room stayed with you.
Every man in the room has a fixed set of facts. He was born in a particular year, held certain jobs, married or didn’t, buried his parents, watched his children leave. The facts are settled, and the program has never asked you to change them.
But a life story isn’t only facts. It is what happened plus the meaning you have given it since. That second half is still open. Søren Kierkegaard said it in his journal in 1843: life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. Session 6 was about that backward look and what it shows you.
When a man looks back, his story tends to bend at the turns in one of two directions:
Good sours into grievance. The wound gets the last word. The good years are remembered as the years before it went wrong.
Hardship turns into growth. The wound becomes wisdom. The hard chapter is remembered as the one that made later chapters possible.
The two words describe a story’s grammar, not how a man feels. A cheerful man can tell a contaminated story (“those were great years, until…”), and a man in grief can tell a redemptive one. You can hear the difference in the shape of a single sentence. Here is one illustrative event told both ways:
“I gave that company thirty-one years, and at fifty-eight they walked me out with a cardboard box. Nothing since has felt the same.”
“Being walked out at fifty-eight was the worst week of my working life. It was also the week I started having breakfast with my son on Tuesdays. We haven’t missed one in six years.”
The event and the man are the same in both. The difference is where the sentence ends, and so what the man carries into the next chapter. A story that ends at the cardboard box keeps the box open. A story that runs on to the Tuesday breakfast doesn’t deny the box. It just won’t let the box be the last word.
The two words come from Dan McAdams, a psychologist at Northwestern University who has spent four decades studying how adults tell their life stories. His central claim, in The Stories We Live By (1993), is the one Session 5 put in front of you: a man doesn’t simply have a story; in a real sense he is the story he tells. Psychologists call this narrative identity: the internalized, evolving story a person builds to make sense of who he has been, who he is, and where he is going.
Three findings matter most for men at your stage of life.
McAdams and four colleagues coded the life stories of midlife adults (ages 35–65) and college students for redemption and contamination sequences. In both groups, redemption sequences went with greater well-being. In the midlife adults, contamination sequences predicted lower well-being. Redemption also predicted well-being better than the overall emotional tone of the stories did. How the turns bend mattered more than whether the story was happy.
Adults who score high on generativity (Erik Erikson’s word for caring about and investing in the next generation) tend to tell what McAdams called a commitment story. In it, early blessing creates a sense of obligation, other people’s suffering is noticed early, and bad scenes repeatedly turn toward good. These are the people who mentor, teach, volunteer, and build for those coming after them. Put simply: the men who pour into the next generation tend to read their own lives redemptively. The program’s hope for the second half depends on this.
A skeptic might say that cheerful people tell cheerful stories, so the story is just temperament in disguise. Jonathan Adler and colleagues reviewed the research and found otherwise. How people narrate their lives predicts their well-being even after you account for their personality traits. The story isn’t a symptom. It is doing work of its own.
One more finding keeps the first three honest. Jennifer Pals followed a group of women from early adulthood into midlife. She found that the people who grew most in maturity weren’t those who hurried to a happy ending. They were the ones who first explored a hard experience in depth, staying with what it cost and what it changed, and only then came to a positive resolution. Rushing to the silver lining skipped the step where growth happens.
Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, saw this before any of the studies:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946)Your attitude toward the past is part of that freedom. The facts were never yours to choose. The reading is.
This is where good intentions go wrong, so it needs saying carefully. McAdams himself spent much of The Redemptive Self (2006) warning about the shadow side of the story he had discovered. Redemption can harden into triumphalism, an insistence that every loss must pay off and every sorrow be repackaged as a lesson. Told that way, it stops being honest and becomes a performance. It can also wound people whose chapters haven’t turned, by implying their story is somehow failing.
That is why in Session 6 you heard this said twice: some chapters are still only loss, and naming that honestly is faithful work.
| A redemptive read is not… | A redemptive read is… |
|---|---|
| Pretending the wound never happened | Naming the wound plainly, then noticing what has grown since |
| Saying the loss was good | Saying God can bring good through what was not good |
| A silver lining found by Friday | A reading that may take years, and may still be unfinished |
| An explanation of why it happened | An account of what grew after it happened |
| A tidy bow on every chapter | Trust that the Author is not finished, even where the page is still dark |
| Something you manufacture to sound faithful | Something you discover, and are sometimes shown by another man |
Scripture doesn’t require tidy bows either. Psalm 88 is a prayer that never turns. It ends, in the NIV, with “darkness is my closest friend.” God kept it in the canon anyway, which tells you that an unresolved lament is still a prayer. Lamentations stays in the rubble for five chapters. It finds hope in the middle (“his compassions never fail. They are new every morning,” 3:22–23) and then goes back into grief without apology. Faithful people have always been allowed to say this still hurts while also saying God is not done.
If you want to see both bends in one story, read the book of Ruth. It is four short chapters, about fifteen minutes, and a contamination narrative is spoken out loud in it and left unrebuked.
Naomi leaves Bethlehem in a famine with a husband and two sons. Ten years later she comes back with neither. When the women of the town call her by name, she corrects them:
“Don’t call me Naomi,” she told them. “Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. I went away full, but the LORD has brought me back empty.”
— Ruth 1:20–21Naomi means “pleasant”; Mara means “bitter.” She renames herself after her wound, and few contamination sentences are cleaner than I went away full, but the LORD has brought me back empty. Notice what the text doesn’t do. No one corrects her theology, and no friend tells her to look on the bright side. Her grief stands on the page as it is.
Then the story keeps going. A foreign daughter-in-law refuses to leave her. A relative named Boaz turns out to be a gō’ēl, a guardian-redeemer. In the Old Testament the word for redemption isn’t abstract. In Leviticus 25, the Jubilee chapter at the root of this program, the gō’ēl is the nearest relative who buys back land a struggling family has lost: “their nearest relative is to come and redeem what they have sold” (Leviticus 25:25).
In Scripture, redemption always presupposes loss. You cannot buy back what was never sold. The redemptive read doesn’t start by denying the damage. It starts by naming it, as Naomi did.
The last scene of the book belongs to Naomi, not Ruth. A grandson is born, and the same women who heard her call herself Bitter now say:
“Praise be to the LORD, who this day has not left you without a guardian-redeemer.… He will renew your life and sustain you in your old age.” Then Naomi took the child in her arms and cared for him.
— Ruth 4:14–16The grandson is Obed, the grandfather of King David. Naomi never learns that her bitter chapter sits in the family line of the Messiah. She only knows that the child in her arms is real and that her life has been renewed in old age. That is often how redemption arrives in the second half: partly seen, and held in your arms before you understand it.
In the room you met Joseph at Genesis 50:20, standing before the brothers who sold him and reading the whole brutal chapter in one sentence. There is an earlier, quieter moment worth knowing. Years before that reunion, while still in Egypt, Joseph named his two sons:
Joseph named his firstborn Manasseh and said, “It is because God has made me forget all my trouble and all my father’s household.” The second son he named Ephraim and said, “It is because God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering.”
— Genesis 41:51–52Two sons, two kinds of healing. Manasseh is relief: the trouble finally loosening its grip. Ephraim is redemption proper. Joseph doesn’t say God took him out of the land of his suffering. He says God made him fruitful in it. For a program whose central image is a tree still bearing fruit in old age (Psalm 92:14), that is the redemptive read in one line. The suffering stays in the land. The fruit grows there too.
Then, at Genesis 50:20, Joseph is careful. He doesn’t say “what you did was fine,” and he doesn’t say “it was all meant to be.” You intended to harm me is plain and unsoftened. The Hebrew verb for “intended” (ḥāšab) appears twice, once for the brothers and once for God: one act, two authors, two meanings. The verb has a surprising second life, and the companion essay The Thread follows it.
The Japanese have a craft called kintsugi: broken pottery is mended with lacquer mixed with gold, so the cracks are highlighted rather than hidden. The bowl is never treated as unbroken. It becomes more beautiful along the line of the break. That is closer to a redemptive read than any silver lining. Your story’s gold column isn’t where the cracks disappear. It is where they have been filled.
Men often ask the practical question: if I’ve been telling a contaminated story for forty years, how do I change it? You don’t change it by deciding to be more positive. You change it by reading more carefully. Three moves help, and they line up with the three marks your witnesses listened for in Session 6:
Say what happened in a sentence a stranger would understand, and what it cost. Don’t skip it, and don’t summarize it into nothing. Pals’ research says this step can’t be skipped. A story that routes around its valley is not yet true.
Not “why did this happen?” That question often has no answer this side of heaven. Ask instead: what exists now that would not exist without that chapter? A friendship, a tenderness toward others who suffer, a skill, a son you now have breakfast with, a faith that bears weight. Look for the Ephraim.
If nothing has grown yet, say so: “The hardest chapter was ___, and I am still waiting to see what God will do with it.” That is a resolution. It hands the pen back to the Author rather than forcing an ending He hasn’t written.
Two quieter helps. First, let other men read it to you. In the threes, your witnesses heard turns you hadn’t named. Men are often the last to see redemption in their own stories, because they lived the pain from the inside. That is why the Compass Worksheet asks for their words. Second, notice the contaminated sentences you say out loud. Almost every man has a few he tells at dinner parties (“that was the year everything fell apart”). Try ending one of them one clause later, and see whether the extra clause is true.
“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness … all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”
— Frederick Buechner, Now and Then (1983)Your marked Read My Story sheet is the outline. With it beside your §1.1 draft, ask four questions:
Then carry what you found into the Compass Worksheet’s Life Theme page and §1.1c. The redemption turn you marked often points straight at your thread.
Read your §1.1 aloud and listen for one thing: who gets the last word in each chapter, the wound or the Author?
If the wound does, you don’t need to fake an ending. You may only need to add “and God is not done.” If the Author does, check that you didn’t get there by skipping the valley.
A pastoral note. For some men, marking a contamination turn opens something heavier than regret: a trauma, an old grief, a loss that has never been spoken. If that happened for you, you are not doing the exercise wrong, and you don’t have to carry it alone. Talk with a facilitator, your pastor, or a counselor, and if it would help, write only what you can bear to write this week. Grief and trauma are treatable at any age, and asking for help is part of a redemptive read, not a failure of one. If you ever have thoughts of ending your life, call or text 988.
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
— Romans 8:28Paul doesn’t say all things are good. He says God works in all things, a verb in the present tense. Your story is still being written, and so is its reading.
Research cited. McAdams, D. P., Reynolds, J., Lewis, M., Patten, A. H., & Bowman, P. J. (2001). When bad things turn good and good things turn bad. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27(4), 474–485. · McAdams, D. P., Diamond, A., de St. Aubin, E., & Mansfield, E. (1997). Stories of commitment: The psychosocial construction of generative lives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(3), 678–694. · Adler, J. M., Lodi-Smith, J., Philippe, F. L., & Houle, I. (2016). The incremental validity of narrative identity in predicting well-being. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 20(2), 142–175. · Pals, J. L. (2006). Narrative identity processing of difficult life experiences. Journal of Personality, 74(4), 1079–1110.