A STORY TOO SHORT
He had just bought a new car.
It wasn’t really new—nothing we owned in high school ever was—but it was new to him, and that mattered. In those days, cars weren’t important because they took you places. They were important because they said something about who you were. They were rolling introductions, declarations of arrival.
Mike wanted his to say more.
So he bought a set of spring jacks. He didn’t take the car to a shop. That would have cost more than the car itself was worth, and besides, doing it yourself was part of the point. He wanted the lift. He wanted the look. He wanted the satisfaction of having done it on his own.
He was alone in his driveway when he started.
He used a bumper jack—common then, crude and unforgiving. As he raised the car, the suspension extended, allowing room to install the spring jacks. Everything worked as it was supposed to. At least, it looked that way.
He slid under the front of the car and looked up, measuring with his eyes where the jack would go. One hand reached upward, the other steadying himself on the pavement. For a moment, everything was suspended—metal, weight, intention.
Then the bumper jack slipped.
There was no warning. No second chance. The car dropped with its full force, and before Mike could move, it crushed the life from him.
His story ended there.
He was mourned—by classmates who filled a gymnasium with stunned silence, by teachers who struggled to explain the unexplainable, by a family whose future suddenly had a jagged, permanent absence in it. We said things like gone too soon, because we had no other language.
We had assumed his story would be longer.
WE ARE OUR OWN STORY
We are tempted to think of lives as lists.
Dates. Achievements. Failures. Diagnoses. Headlines. Obituaries reduced to a paragraph. We summarize people the way we summarize resumes, trimming complexity until something manageable remains.
But that has never been how human life actually works.
Each person is a story.
Not a slogan. Not an inspirational poster. A story—unfolding in time, shaped by choices and accidents, full of meaning that only becomes visible when we stop long enough to notice.
Mike’s life was not defined by the way it ended. The accident was not the story—it was only the final sentence. His real story included friendships, laughter, insecurity, hope, and the quiet longing all teenagers carry to be seen and to matter. His death felt unbearable precisely because his story had felt unfinished.
Eugene Peterson once wrote that the Bible doesn’t give us “information about God” so much as it draws us into a story we must live inside. Truth, he insisted, is not primarily something we master, but something that forms us over time. Stories slow us down. They ask for attention. They refuse to be reduced to bullet points.
That is true not only of Scripture, but of people.
When we reduce a person to a moment—their worst mistake, their final act, their public failure—we do violence to the story that carried them there. We flatten what was meant to be lived in chapters.
C. S. Lewis understood this deeply. He warned that we are far too casual in the way we treat one another, forgetting that we are not dealing with “ordinary people,” but with beings whose lives are moving toward unimaginable glory or ruin. In other words, every person we encounter is in the middle of a story whose ending we cannot yet see.
That changes how we look at the sidewalk moments of life.
The teenager under the car.
The woman kneeling over broken eggs.
The stranger sitting with her hands open, empty, unsure what just slipped away.
They are not interruptions to the real story.
They are the story.
And so are we.
We are characters still being written—our lives shaped by what we notice, what we ignore, where we stop, and where we keep moving. Some stories end sooner than we expect. Others take turns we never imagined. None of them are insignificant.
To tell a story truthfully is an act of love.
To listen to one is an act of reverence.
And perhaps the quiet task of a lifetime is this:
to learn to see ourselves and one another not as problems to solve or facts to record, but as stories—fragile, unfinished, and worth paying attention to while there is still time.