Why should we write our life’s story?
We Christians are committed to people and history.
Watch our Truth in Two to find out the history behind peoples’ histories (full text below).
Our end is the beginning of another life, another story, another memoir.
Subscribe to “Truth in Two” videos from Comenius (here). Mark is President of The Comenius Institute (website). Dr. Eckel spends time with Christian young people in public university (1 minute video), teaching at Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis, and interprets culture from a Christian vantage point (1 minute video). Consider becoming a Comenius patron (here).
Picture Credit: Luke Renoe, Snappy Goat
FULL TEXT
In November 1940, during World War II, the Nazis sealed half a million Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. The documentary entitled Who Will Write Our History? explains. Faced with extermination by Hitler, Jewish people answered with pen on paper. Hidden in secret, the histories of Jewish people were kept in storage, so that future generations would know “they were here.” The Jews were writing their memoirs.
Memoirs are autobiographies, diaries, journals, just simple accounts of a person’s life. Who else will be able to write about a person’s life but the person herself? And why should anyone want to leave behind writing about their lives? I believe the answer is, we are convinced that both people and history are important. Stories of people are attractive to us. Reader’s Digest, for instance, continues to be published, in part, because first-person narratives are included in each issue. Real people want to know what other real people have been through. A famous rich person’s words telling me how she made her millions may matter to some. But most people want to read about the single mom, who lived through harsh economic times, to see her children graduate from college.
In the famous movie The Shawshank Redemption, Morgan Freeman’s character “Red” carves his name into a wooden beam in an apartment where he has lived. His simple statement “I was here” is exactly why people write memoirs. Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto or the story of the mom who made sure her kids had a college education, draw us in. Why are memoirs important? Because in our memoirs, we declare, people and history are important.
For Truth in Two, this is Dr. Mark Eckel, President of the Comenius Institute, personally seeking truth wherever it’s found.