What Just Happened? 2013 in Review

It's been a helluva year.

I'm not just saying that about my personal year. It's been one crazy year. There have been mega-highs and ultra lows. The most diffinitive thing I can say about 2013, personally, is that it ripped in like a hurricane and punched out faster than mantis shrimp.

The first half of the year was marked with deaths, loss, and change. Lots of change. My step-dad, his dog, a friend. Moved myself twice before July. Moved mom to Florida, first time she's lived outside the Susquehanna Valley since 1980. My jobs flipped as to which was the predominant job (this is a change I am most happy about.) New car, new phone (finally entered the realm of 'smart' phones.)

The early part of the year saw the beginning of an endeavor almost 25 years in the making. Life long friend, Shawn and I began laying the foundation for Counter Monkey Comics, and what would be our first (and not last) appearance at the Baltimore Comic Con.

Between moving myself, my mom, a family vacation, 2 jobs and all the beautiful insanity of life we reached our goals for the convention and I self published my first comic book. Which is now entirely SOLD OUT! It wasn't a profit winning undertaking, but it was fun and so very satisfying.

The second half of the year, which saw the completion of the comic, it's printing and the convention - also allowed me to settle into a rhythm of sorts in this new normal. Teeth were pulled, literally. And I realized that I was finally entering the goals I had set for myself when I moved back to PA in May, 2011.

A little over 2 years and a lot of unexpected twists and turns and foolish selfmade detours, and I was finally getting to where I wanted to be for this chapter of my life.

I can't be the only one to have realized this. Many times. While perpetually forgetting it: Stop trying to make God's plan for your life something you can plot out and control.

I'm a firm believer in not saying, "I can't." But this is one of those situations where it applies.

I had this vision of what I wanted to do when  I moved back to PA. Then I read inspiring books. Had conversations with wonderful and amazing people. I lost sight of my vision and started following the experiences of someone else.

In a way my step-dad's passing presented the opportunity of solitude and silence to hear something God must have been saying for the year and a half prior.

"Kid, what're you doing? These are good things, but not what you were made for."

Some how I had gotten it in my head that pursuing my dreams of writing/drawing and storytelling were some how selfish and unimportant. No one said this to me. I said it to myself. I had convinced myself that I was not severing God fully if I wasn't immersed in helping people with every waking breath. I filled myself with pride and some sort of ambition to do things I wasn't called to do. I misread situations as signs and direction.

Like so many, I became my own worst enemy. Fortunately God doesn't give up on us. No matter how long it takes, when we truly let our hearts be still, we can hear him. And I did.

Write    Draw   Tell stories   Love God & Neighbors

These are my directives. I can't compare what God has given me to do to what others are doing. I can't map out what roads his leading will take me on, or what people I will encounter along the way.

So, 2013, you were a hell of a year. In good times and hard. You were better to others, and even worse to many more. You're a part of my history now, and I can't change that, nor do I want to. In ending this post, here's one of my favorite quotes from The Fellowship of the Ring:

"Home is behind, the world ahead,
and there are many paths to tread
through shadows to the edge of night,
until the stars are all alight.
Then world behind and home ahead,
we'll wander back and home to bed.
Mist and twilight, cloud and shade,
away shall fade! Away shall fade!"

 Have an incredible 2014. It'll be incredible at times. It will have moments that truly suck. There will be days or hours that seem unbearbale followed by moments that set your soul aflame.

Just put one foot in front of the other, and keep living. No matter what tomorrow brings, only you control how you will respond or react. Strive to respond rather than react.

The world is what you make of it, so let's make it better this year.


grace, peace + HOPE
-Jesse

The Teller of Stories

Where would we be with out stories or the ones who share them with us?

A pale dismal place devoid of hope or dreams I should think.

Stories are the common thread through every human culture. Stories of hope, despair, valiant heroes and cunning villains can be found in every tribe and creed. But what is a story without someone to tell it.

"Australian Aborigines say that the big stories—the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life—are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting their prey in the bush."
~Robert Moss, Dreamgates

The story teller is a person who chronicles the history of a people. They capture the hopes and fears of their way of life, and embody them in fantastic tales. Sometimes they are colorful retellings of true events. For what story teller can resist making that one moment more dramatic or diabolical?

Other times the stories are complete fabrications of the storyteller's imagination. But in it's telling truths can be found that are more deep than any you'd find in a court of law. Like the stories Walter's uncles tell in "Secondhand Lions."

Sometimes, it's a fabrication of the truth. A clever disguise of real events told in a fictitious way. As in Hamlet's play revealing he knew the truth about his uncle.

Whether the story is factual or fictitious is irrelevant if a truth can be gleaned from it's depths.


Stories are meant to teach.

If we can learn to be compassionate from a tale about a talking bear, so be it. In growing up I heard stories from many places. Whether I believed they were stories of true events or not didn't matter. It was what those stories taught that was important.

While I hold the stories from the Bible to be true, and Aesop's Fables to be clever tales, the lessons I can take from each are as powerful. The Bible taught me not to kill or steal (and many other things) Aesop taught me things like using common sense and perseverance. Both helped me grow.

There are fundamental truths in these stories, and in others I've never read, that if we take the time to understand them, they help us grow into healthy adults. This is what Uncle Hub (from Secondhand Lions) tells Walt this after he was asked if any of the stories were true,

"Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love... true love never dies. You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn't matter if it's true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in."

Stories are meant to entertain.

Ancient story tellers would gather their people around a fire in the dark of night and weave incredible tales of might and valor. Today we sit in darkened movie theaters. But the same story told over a fire and projected on a silver screen carries the same lessons, and adventures.

Books, movies, songs and poetry can take us, however briefly, from our daily life to another place. We can escape into an world so unlike our own and disappear for hours at a time. Richard Adams takes us down into the grass with the rabbits of Watership Down and leads us on an amazing journey full of outer trials and inner strength.

JRR Tolkien invents a whole other world and fills it with languages and people that have never been seen before. In this world of Middle Earth, we find that they too have stories of their own. Stories that make their story so much richer and vibrant because

If a story told in whatever form can remove us from a problem for a time, give our mind a chance to disconnect, we can approach it with a fresh innovation. Stories can make us laugh or cry, or they can strike a cord so deep that something will stay with us for ever.

"Lord! when you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book. ~Christopher Morley

Stories are meant to endure.

Some stories are so specific in time that they may not live out the decade. But real stories. Stories that inspire, teach and entertain last forever. Just look at works like the Iliad, the Odyssey, works of Shakespeare, Poe, and Dickenson. Some stories grow and add new chapters as time goes on, others stand strong on their own.

Some, like the Battle of Thermopylae, become huge retellings of ancient achievement, and modern retelling. Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Narnia all continue to pull in young readers and minds, because they are so versatile in their craft. The stories told, while specific, are also universal. Selflessness, right and wrong, trust, friendships, the strength of family...

All these things are in stories. They are also in our everyday lives. Our lives are stories. Sometimes they are too big or close for us to realize what we are experiencing. So step back and listen to a story. If you can't listen to one, then tell one. For without stories we are nothing. 


Stories are Powerful.

Nations rose out of stories. If our nation's stories are hopeful, we can be hopeful. If they are barbarous and depraved...we become likewise. If you need proof of that look at America. But that is a rant for another day.

A story told can not change a life. But what is gleaned or inspired by one can. Look at the greatest storyteller who ever lived. Jesus. He told complicated lessons about God, and life. His lessons weren't 3 point sermons with power point and video inserts. (not that there is anything wrong with that) but he told stories. And if he needed to he explained them.

So what greater thing could we aspire to than to be storytellers ourselves? If you are a follower of Christ, there should be no less than two stories always ready in your mind. His story, and yours.

“Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”
~CS Lewis