"I am afraid that every time I write, I will be reduced to my ideas. I am not my ideas. No one is their ideas, no one is their beliefs, and no one is their values. Because underneath all those things is a story, an experience, a place, a family, a relationship, a brokenness. Regardless of how much I may love or resent someone’s beliefs, I must acknowledge that if I take the time to look through those beliefs, I face another messy, broken, wounded, dream-filled, just-trying-to-find-their-way human being made in the image of Almighty God. Their beliefs are informed by the stories that, yes, God shaped, formed, and has given them. Especially now, when ideas come a dime a dozen, filling the facebook airwaves with pharisaic declarations about right and wrong, the Kingdom of God always sees and cuts through stories.  ||  To share ideas is cheap; they require of us no intimacy, vulnerability, or humility. But to share the stories underneath it all—the frightening, joyful, and messy things that make us who we are—that comes at a cost. Not all of us have the language or the courage to do it. I’ve definitely run away from it too many times. So instead of broadcasting our ideas and opinions, let us commit to telling our stories. And then let’s live those stories in the fullest, richest, and most courageous way possible. Because everyone can write a blog, and there are definitely people who are better at it than I am, but no one else anywhere in the history of any time has my story. To tell it again and again in a society that is persistent in its lies, that profits from my forgetting, to remind myself of who I am and the God who made me, well that might be the most dangerous, subversive, messy, humanizing thing I could ever do."

http://natejlee.com/