Storytelling
Will people remember you when you die? Or just their story of you?
1 Samuel 4:19 & 22
Now [Eli’s] daughter-in-law, the wife of Phinehas, was pregnant, about to give birth. When she heard the news that the ark of God was captured and that her father-in-law and her husband were dead, she bowed and gave birth, for her labor pains overwhelmed her. … She said, “The glory has departed from Israel, for the ark of God has been captured.”
I wonder about this woman. She only shows up here. Nameless herself in Scripture and identified only by her relationships to named men, she performs three dramatic (though woman-congruent) acts: giving birth, speaking one line of lamentation, and immediately dying. Way to fridge someone we just met only to move the plot forward, Jeez.
Was she real? Even if the overall story was real, were this woman’s actions just so? Was she remembered for it? Or is does she have no name here because no one could remember her at all and the story needed some flavor? She’s so two-dimensional it feels like the storytellers dressed up a cardboard cutout, stapled a pillow below the robe so you’d know she was pregnant (and therefore the good kind of woman), and dangled her from the lighting scaffold for juuust long enough that the audience gasps when her cord is cut.
Will people remember you when you die? Or just their story of you?
Write out a pretend obituary for yourself. Take a look: how many of those talking points are about how well you raised, obeyed, or supported someone else? Consider what it means to have made a name for yourself. How would you do that withOUT piling on worldly accomplishments?