Finding Hope Through Suffering | Here As In Heaven | Diana Harrison

And the word says, Are any of you guys familiar with Friends? The show, not the concept.

It's a little bit before my time, but when I was in high school, I went through a huge Friends phase.

It kind of had a resurgence when I was in high school.

So as I was preparing for this, like a lot of my life correlates to just different moments in the show.

It's a lot of fun.

But I was thinking about the episode of Friends where...

Everybody is in Monica's living room, as they are, right? It's just kind of their thing.

But they're in Monica's living room, and Phoebe walks in, and all of the friends are sitting there watching Old Yeller.

And they're all just absolutely on the verge of tears, about to have a feeling.

And Phoebe walks in, and she's like, what are you guys doing? And they're like, we're watching Old Yeller.

And she said, well, why are you upset? It's Old Yeller.

It's a happy movie.

And they're like...

What are you talking about? So they're sitting there having this conversation.

And it turns out Phoebe's mom had been cutting off the end of some of these movies so that she wouldn't see the sad part.

So it's like Bambi without the beginning.

It's like Old Yeller without the end.

And she would just cut it off and say, the end.

And...

So Ross turns around and she's like, I don't think your mom would want you to see what's going to happen next.

So Phoebe's in there and she's just watching the movie and she's like, oh my gosh, what's going on with the dog? You found him.

He's your best friend.

Why do you have that gun? Why are you taking him out behind the barn? And it's just this horrible moment for her where she realizes, oh my gosh, I've been living without a piece of the story.

And this is pretty important.

So the reason that I kind of just had that pop into my head is that I think some of us may be living with incomplete stories.

Once Phoebe knew the missing piece of the narrative, once that piece had clicked into place, it didn't necessarily mean that everything else she had seen in the movie hadn't happened, right? That didn't just completely invalidate everything else she had seen.

But that missing piece was pretty important.

And once you put that in place, it changes the way you see the rest of the story.

So if we're living in incomplete narratives, that missing piece might be important.

It doesn't mean that everything else we know is wrong.

It just means that once that's in place, once that's in context, man, we might see things differently.

The stories we tell ourselves matter, and here's what I mean by that.

I once heard it said that human beings are hermeneutic machines, and all that means is that we are absolutely dying to make meaning from something.

So when we see events X, Y, and Z in our lives, we just can't help but tell ourselves a story that makes them make sense.