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Inciting incident is a term from the film world.
It's an event in someone's life. It could be
good or bad. It could be
tremendous or it could be
a tragedy.
But it in some way
defines the character's life,
it pushes the protagonist forward in their vision and their mission in life.
And so we wrote this book
to try to help with that moment, that kind of cross-section where your
dreams and your ambitions,
your vision for your life,
comes to meet all the
obstacles and
barriers and disappointments that it might run into along the way.
And so out of that, Inciting Incidents was born.
We're here at Story to launch our book Inciting Incidents.
A book that was
dreamt of and
born last year at Story 2011, and now at Story 2012 we get to
launch the book,
We chose these specific contributors for Inciting Incidents, actually myself and
the team here in partnership with Sarah Cunningham, who was the curator
on the project. They're great storytellers and
God's given them a unique story, each of them, to tell.
We didn't want it to just be six people's stories. We really wanted it to invite
other people into
the book and into our conversation
and really into our shared life. These contributors are able to tell their
stories in a way that's so compelling
that a reader can then come alongside a process those stories
and then learn to heal
in the midst of their own stories themselves.
And I hope that
they'll read the book and not just read the book as
indulging in this stories of the authors who have written it, but they'll actually think about
their own story
and their own plot line and
where they want it to go.
The Inciting Incident I chose to write about in the book actually
occurred not
too far from this room. It was about five years ago. I was living in
downtown Chicago,
and I was acting full-time.
One night,
it was probably two or three o'clock in the morning, something just kind of
jarred me out of bed. I was pacing and I was sweating
and my heart was racing and I felt like something was
really wrong with me. And I was so freaked out I just went to the
emergency room.
It turns out that I had a panic attack.
I had never had a panic attack and didn't understand what was going on with me.
As I started to kind of explore that incident, it became clear
that it was connected to
something that had occurred years before.
And the story goes that I was sexually abused by two
guys in my neighborhood when I was nine or ten years old. And that moment
set me on a path of addiction to ***, to sex.
The moment that I was experiencing in my bedroom
just a couple miles from here was my body and God saying, "Something's wrong.
We need to do something." So when Sarah approached me and invited me to
participate in the project I said yes immediately. So I knew that
being a part of this project 1)
would allow me to continue to do my own work of exploration, and then also
2)
along with this great collective of other amazing authors and
other amazing stories, that as a book would give others the permission to do
that as well, to explore their their own story.
I don't know if I'd say I identified my incident.
I think it identified me in terms of
what happened to me was something I never invited or asked for. My father
one night decided--in the middle of the night--
that he was done with our family, he was done with his marriage, and he was
deciding to leave.
And he decided at 11:30 one night that
that was when he wanted to be done. So he walked out, and that was
nothing that I asked for or was ready for or was intending on having a part of my life.
Nobody wants a broken home or a broken family.
So that changed the course of my life forever. His decision altered my
whole life
and
it's something that I can definitely identify as having a before and an after.
Before, I was involved in a
two-parent home; we had family traditions, family vacations,
meals together, and then after that night
I split to
being everything apart. And I had two homes, two traditions, two everything.
I just had everything different after that moment and
it changed everything about my life.
So I chose to write about this in the book because
I just feel like we can all have something to offer as part of our story in terms of pain
and going through something. We all have something to offer
that can step into somebody else's story.
Henri Nouwen talks about being a wounded healer and that we don't have to be over
something, we don't have to have something altogether,
but just talking about our process and inviting the freedom of other people to
talk about their process is what I hope for. And
being honest about where I am
and kind of where my journey has taken me.
I hope that it helps other people sort of
take the steps and the courage to work through their grief.
Well, I've had a few inciting incidents in my life. I think
the first inciting incident came when I was nine or ten years old. I was at a
birthday party for a girl
that I was in
school with, and as all the kids were around
her as she was opening up her presents, her mother was in the back filming this
entire event. We're all anticipating this moment when we get to that point
in the party we get to see ourselves on television.
So the mom takes the VHS and puts it in the VCR and hits play.
And when the snow cleared, you see all these beautiful children sitting around in a
circle. But then I looked closer, and I saw this kid who was twitching his face and
clearing his throat and opening up his mouth really really wide, shaking his
head. And my first thought was
who is this weirdo, right? Who invited this guy?
And the closer I looked, I realized much to my shame that that kid was me.
And really at that moment I made a covenant with myself
to never
allow myself to be shamed like that again. A few months later, I was diagnosed with
with tourette's syndrome.
And so tourettes has been a part of my life and my story
for quite some time now--well, ever since. It really spawned
what I have called my imposter who I named Super Dave.
And Super Dave became the star athlete,
the AP student, the hard worker. I had created a false self. I created a pressed, prompt,
perfect, good-looking,
always on time,
athletic,
funny, witty person to make sure that no one would ever seen
my broken self again.
This war between little broken Dave
and the demands of Super Dave
wore my physical body to the ground.
And on a Sunday morning,
I was scheduled to preach at a very large church
in Charlotte, and
that morning,
my body couldn't keep up, and I had a panic attack at
2 a.m. in the morning. I found myself pinned to the bed.
I couldn't breathe; I could think straight; I was sweating; my skin was
burning. And it was at that point that I realized
I need help.
A lot of times an inciting incident is something
you can see approaching you.
But a lot of times it shows up out of nowhere, and you had no idea this was
about to happen. That was the scenario in my case.
I was at a conference in San Francisco, and through a very long elaborate story
ended up hitting my head, which sent me to the emergency room. And when I was
there they thought I had some bleeding on the brain. And when the did the MRIs and
cat scans, etc., they learned that I had a grade two oligo astrocytoma
brain tumor, which is a glioma. It's like tree branches moving
through my brain, like chicken wire
through a birthday cake.
So it's inoperable, they can't remove it. I was given five to seven years left to
live and
this nice, brunette woman sat down and looked at me and said, "You have cancer."
And she got up, and she left, and I was there by myself. And that was the door closing
behind me and introducing me to the rest of my life. As a creative consultant, I tell
stories people, I help make films, or I help write books. My whole
life has been about telling other people's stories. But I've always felt deep down that
have my own story that I wanted to tell but was, to be honest, really afraid.
And the other thing was nothing bad ever really happened to me. I've lived a very charmed
life.
And um...
that ended pretty quickly when they said I've got five to seven years to left to
live.
A story was unfolding. I didn't know the end of it. I barely knew the beginning of it
or the middle of it. All I knew is that something new was happening.
And so when the opportunity for Inciting Incidents came up, I knew
this was the story that I needed to tell and just start to kind of figure out
how to document this, how to share this with people even though I don't know all the
answers yet.
If someone watching this or if somebody who's reading the book feels like
right now they're in the middle of inciting incident, I would say
that that's a really exciting stage to be in. Oftentimes our feeling
when we're
exposing things that
feel uncomfortable
or sometimes painful,
our first response is to just move on.
And
I think that in that
pain, God often wants to speak to us in ways that He can't
when we're sort of
everything's going well. It's kind of like the theory of touching a hot stove. We
don't want to touch a hot stove twice because it hurts, and so we
are conditioned
to avoid pain at all costs and to not do something again
and guard against it.
But unfortunately we cannot
outrun pain and we cannot outrun grief.
We are all going to go through these
inciting incidents. We're all going to deal with
these struggles. So I would encourage people to document their stories.
And if you feel comfortable, sharing it with
even just family members or close friends. But if you're willing, there's a lot of people who want to hear
your story. Share it with the world.
Be who you are,
not who you think you should be.
Be your broken,
pathetic self.
And that's who we are. And then allow Jesus to come
in that
and to take over that and to shape and mold and
bring beauty from those ashes.
And then
you life, as Paul says, is Christ.
And for you to die is gain.
That's the gospel.
And that's what an inciting incident will lead you to.