Everyone loves a good story. There’s a reason why exercise programs add all of those before and after photos and stories to the end of their sales pitch—because people are inspired by stories. Seeing someone else’s success in weight loss pulls you off the couch and sends you running. Why? Because stories enable you to imagine tangible results that before were only intangible dreams.
Have you ever watched a superhero movie and left energized? Or a sports movie that left you feeling like practicing? Or a love story that made you want to better your own relationships? That’s the power of stories.
The problem with stories is that, for many people, they only exist in a book or on a screen. Or perhaps you hear an inspirational story in a church service or in one of those pep-rally type occasions in school where class is cancelled so everyone can huddle in the gymnasium and listen to a guest speaker.
Stories have the most power and create the biggest impact when they are close to us. When your best friend learns what it looks like to be kind because you showed kindness. When people become more real to us, the stories they tell become more real.
There is one more thing about all those stories that you’ve heard. Most of the good ones come out of a place that is hard. Most of them come from someone who had to fight. This very website is full of stories. Hard stories about addiction and cries for help. Humbling stories about people who are strong enough to admit they can’t make it on their own.
The best thing is: they are not all the same story. Sometimes you won’t hear a story about how, “I was lost and beaten by addiction and now I am free and feeling alive,” but you might hear one that says, “I’m still in my struggle. And it’s terrible. And I want to quit. But I won’t.”
Because maybe you don’t need another story of someone else making it while you are still stuck. Someone else happy while you are deep in sadness. Maybe you need to hear something more relatable.
So what is YOUR story? What do you want it to be? (Tweet This!) And whose life will change because of it? It doesn’t have to be exciting and intense.
It just needs to be true
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Do you have a story? We want to hear it.
What’s Your Porn Story? by XXXchurch.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.