Lost the Plot: Finding Our Story in a Confusing World

Exposition

We were ready to give up when my dad found it. Broken in two, buried upside down in the red Midwestern soil at the back of a small cemetery was my great-great-great grandfather’s tombstone. The aged sandstone was caked in layers of dirt and black mold, and his last name was spelled Wisner.

Dead of unknown causes before his thirtieth birthday, the stone and a few estate papers were the only testaments to his existence. His mother had also died around age thirty, and his older brother passed away four years before him in his early thirties. A genetic disorder? A run of unfortunate family luck? The answer is lost to time.

Jacob Wisner. Died February 27, 1860. Aged 29 years, 5 months, 18 days.

Nothing more.

As I paused to wipe sweat from my eyes while gazing at the destroyed marker covered by earth in backcountry Ohio, I wondered who will remember me to seek out my resting place 160 years from now.

I’ve been in love with stories for as long as I can remember. My earliest memories of joy from childhood are connected with my imagination. I loved to play games of make believe, often trying to save the world by fighting titanic battles with a toy sword while running around my house.

When I was four-years-old, I’d ask my mom to write down stories I’d make up on the spot, typically about Transformers (when they were still cool, before Hollywood ruined them). When I learned to write, I’d create characters and jot down my own adventures, invent worlds, and draw comic books.

In third grade, I made my first super hero and showed an early proclivity for alliteration: Drung the Dynamic Defender, a muscled, cape-wearing savior who wore a knight’s helmet. In fourth grade, I drew a series of comics featuring my new hero, Water Master, without realizing I’d plagiarized Aquaman.

My other early love was history, maybe because it’s the stories we tell of people who came before. I was mesmerized by the ancient civilizations I’d hear about in passing at church, like the Assyrians and Babylonians, so I’d ask my mom to help me read about them in the encyclopedia to learn more about these people and what they did, what they were like.

It turns out stories are important to all of us because they provide our lives with meaning. Whether you realize it or not, you live your life according to several kinds of internalized stories. The tales we believe about ourselves and the world define who we are as people.

When someone asks you to talk about yourself, odds are pretty good you’ll talk about your life as a story: where you were born, what your family was like, what you decided to do for a career, your religious beliefs, where you see yourself in the future.

We also don’t learn facts about life in a vacuum. We understand them within the framework of a narrative, more readily accepting facts we think support our beliefs and either ignoring, explaining away, or rejecting those that make us call our views into question.

It’s in this way that nearly all our lives are controlled by the kinds of stories we believe. We start out life accepting the tales told to us by other people—those in our families, nations, and religions—but as we mature, we begin to choose which stories we accept as reality.

Recently, I’ve felt like my own story was unravelling. I’m not the man I’d wanted to be when I was young. As a Christian, I’d always thought I’d be doing important things for God and that I’d be successful like I was while growing up.

Instead, I saw my life as littered with failures. I’ve so far been unsuccessful sustaining any kind of ministry, have largely wandered aimlessly when it comes to a professional career, and haven’t been able to maintain a romantic relationship.

I was disillusioned with the American church and its understanding of Christianity, by the people within it who’ve lost sight of the fact Christ taught us to be humble servants who love others selflessly. We instead too often behave like overlords who seek to force others into living according to our morals in ways that resemble the political methods used by the empires Scripture rebukes.

Like my great-grandfather’s headstone, I felt lost, buried, and broken.

But in the death knells of the idea I had of who I am, I’ve been slowly starting to rewrite my definitions of success, self-understanding, and acceptance.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to unravel the stories of God, other people, and myself, and I think it’s a journey worth sharing, because the tales we choose to cling to—like the early versions I had of my own story—may be poor reflections of reality and doing us more harm than good.

That applies to almost all of us. I think the broader stories we believe within Western cultures (the cultures of European descent) have been fraying at the edges for hundreds of years, slowly falling apart and starting to collapse.

As a result, our lives are losing their bearings as we drift within different versions of subtly nihilistic narratives. We would all do well to examine the stories we buy into and to peer more closely at and ask ourselves probing questions about them.

That’s the adventure I’d like to take with you in the pages that follow, as I share my life, the stories I’ve believed, and the thoughts I’ve had throughout different parts of it.

We’ll look at my experiences with Christianity and the church; explore why we think in the ways we do and see reality differently; examine our shared heritage as both children of the West and, for many of us, of America; look more deeply into what love is and what the hardships of life mean; and follow between chapters the progression of my personal story as a metaphor, a microcosm of the larger tales we hold to.

I’ve been wrong a lot, and I bet you probably have been, too. The fact is, a lot of the stories we’ve believed aren’t actually true, and not in some malicious way, but because in our innocence we can be gullible.

I assumed the seemingly-idyllic, rural northern Florida I grew up in had always been peaceful and relatively prosperous. The friendly small towns and tranquil land today give no indication that 120 years ago they were the center of a large network of prison work camps that abused and killed convicts in the rape of the land for phosphate.

It’s a story that’s glossed over by local historians for obvious reasons. The thickly-wooded gorges and ravines I ran through as a child were once mining pits where men, women, and children were forced labor in an industry that was responsible for the establishment of several of the communities I know so well.

An exposé by a Brooklyn newspaper in 1900; the death of a boy that made national news in 1903; and the memoirs of a former prison guard likening the camps to an American Siberia eventually contributed to the demise of the work-lease programs used as convict slave labor, but the memories and the spiritual heritage that hang over the land remain in need of healing.

Just as we all do. We all need healing from the trauma that’s been inflicted on us and from the damage we’ve dealt, whether we think we do or not. It sits with us and festers like a wound unless it’s dealt with, corrupting our personal stories and our souls.

Healing. Redemption. Central aspects to the Christian story of existence, the story I’ve imperfectly understood but clung to since childhood, and the story whose reformation in my heart and mind has been setting me free.

It was in that spirit that, a couple years after unearthing my great-grandfather’s tombstone, I returned to Ohio to see what I could do about restoring it.

1

Foundations and Meaning

Family has played an important role in my journey to understand how we become the kinds of people we are. How does your family affect who you are? Can events from the past still impact the present?

Each of us is a unique mix of countless ancestors in our mother’s and father’s families, our DNA forming our human hardware, so to speak. That’s the nature part of us, and the nurture part—how we’re raised by our families during our formative years—is usually held responsible for what makes up our human software: our opinions, beliefs, and personalities.

But it turns out genetics also affects us in ways that had been attributed to nurture. Epigenetics is a young science, but it’s produced evidence that our experiences in life change the expression of our genes in ways that are passed on to our children. In other words, when we go through a trauma, there are observable changes to our cells as a result.

That suggests that the converse may also be true, that actions you and I take today can slowly help to heal the hurts and genetic alterations our ancestors experienced so that we and our children can begin to recover from traumas we inherited from the past.

In my curiosity to learn more about my family, I began to make deeper connections within myself. I’ve been able to recognize themes in my life that are echoes from the past. My hope is that I can bring some bit of redemption to the hurts in the multigenerational tale of which I’m a part.

As I’ve learned of the humble origins of my paternal family, stories have emerged that call for healing. I’m told my grandfather, who passed away before I was born, could be a stern man, which is not surprising for a farmer who lived during the Great Depression in rural Indiana. As one of eleven siblings, I have a massive extended family.

Yet I only know people from a few of those siblings, in large part due to a grievance among several which resulted in them no longer associating with each other. It’s tragic and troubling that brothers and sisters could choose to cut each other out of their lives, and I sense a lingering predisposition within myself that could be an echo of those inclinations.

Tracing back further, it becomes clear that the succeeding generations from my great-grandfather to my grandfather and then my father mellowed in several ways. Only vague, negative overtones are recalled of my great-great grandfather, and his father, of course, is the mysterious owner of the prodigal tombstone I seek to restore.

My fourth and fifth great-grandfathers were Quakers, and my fifth brought his family from South Carolina to Western Ohio as part of a Quaker settlement. My sixth great-grandfather was one of five brothers, sons of my seventh great-grandfather, Jacob, who came to America in 1749 from the small village of Bubendorf, Switzerland.

Settling in northern South Carolina in the 1750s, he and his family became victims of the Revolutionary War. At least one of his sons was an active Tory in local militias. There was a lot of fighting in the area where his family lived, likened by historians to the equivalent of a civil war between neighbors.

It’s been difficult to learn much about Jacob and his sons outside of South Carolina land records, and his sons eventually went separate ways and lost touch with one another, quite possibly to escape infamy amongst their neighbors for having supported the English Crown during the War. No related Wiseners seem to have remained in South Carolina following the early 1800s.

Even before setting foot in America, Jacob was banished upon leaving his native village, a place where the Wiseners had lived for hundreds of years. People were so heavily