Stolen Identity & The Power of Our Stories
It really happened. It really matters.
I was in my college-girl era when social media slowly became a thing. The Facebook started my freshman year of college. These were the days of plugging in digital cameras to massive laptops so you could upload an entire album of pictures to your profile. Here’s 46 pictures I took at a date party, want to see them allllll? It’s what we did back in the days of yore.1
The summer before graduate school, I worked for my sister who had a small law practice in rural Oklahoma. I was basically her legal secretary and she paid me to answer the phone, get her lunch, and spend the night at her house so we could stay up late watching Dawson’s Creek.
One day she got an email from a man who prefaced the whole thing with “this is going to sound really crazy…” He explained that he had met a woman online and they had arranged to meet in person at a restaurant. On his way to meet her, he had a funny feeling so he bailed, turned his car around and went home to do a little digging. What he discovered was the woman he had arranged to meet was me.
Well not actually me, but she was using photos of me to connect with him online and invite him to dinner.2 He even sent us the link to her profile. Creeeepy. He’d uncovered this mystery because he found my sister’s blog where she had written about our family and posted pictures of me NOT living in Houston and NOT on my way to meet him for dinner. I remember he said something like: “Anyway, you all seem like nice people and I wanted you to know what I found, here’s her email address.”
Suffice it to say, my sister went into full lawyer mode, tracked the woman down, sent her a cease and desist letter, and demanded she take down the fake MySpace page. Yes, it was all because of the unsurprisingly lax security measures of MySpace.com and yes, I am embarrassed to confirm that I did, in fact, have a MySpace page. In the end, the woman actually responded to us and even apologized, the page was taken down, MySpace no longer exists and I think it’s fair to say we’re all better for it.
What still lingers in my mind as I tell this story is the feeling of seeing my face paired up with someone else’s words meant to communicate who they were to someone else. It was such deception, such a crossed boundary. She was trying to tell a story that didn’t actually exist and when the truth came into full view, it was all a bit sad. It was my story to tell. My trips to Guatemala and Estonia. My college friends. My internship. And while I knew it wasn’t all that extraordinary, when someone else tried to tell it, I realized how much it really mattered.
Our stories have power.
You can hardly find anyone in any field of study or stage of life that doesn’t agree with this. Stories captivate our children even from the earliest of board books. They teach us about good and evil, right and wrong, and all the complexities of relationships caught somewhere in between. They engage our creativity and compel us to action. They really can be irresistible.
Jesus used storytelling often as a traveling rabbi with crowds following him everywhere. The parable of the four soils, the mustard seed, the yeast, the hidden treasure—these are just a few of the stories he told along the way to teach about the Kingdom. But even more compelling than the ones he told is the one he actually lived. In John’s gospel, Jesus is called the word or the log'-os (G3056) which on a very basic level means something uttered by a living voice that embodies a concept or an idea.3 Essentially, Jesus’s story communicates all that God wants to teach us about his Kingdom and the true way to life.
I’ve been digging around in Scripture for more on this idea—that stories matter and we should tell them—and what I’ve found is simple and cannot be ignored.
“Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his love endures forever. Let the redeemed of the Lord tell their story—those he redeemed from the hand of the foe, those he gathered from the lands, from east and west, from north and south.” Psalm 107:1-2, NIV, emphasis mine
“As Jesus was getting into the boat, the man who had been demon-possessed begged to go with him. Jesus did not let him, but said, ‘Go home to your own people and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.’” Mark 5:18-19, NIV, emphasis mine.
“They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.” Revelation 12:10, NIV, emphasis mine
These are a few of the passages I’ve been sitting with for a few weeks and I haven’t been able to shake them. What I mean is they keep showing up in all the basic, but not obvious ways that I love for things to show up. Someone mentions one of them to me in a podcast interview. I see a pig and it takes me back to the story from Mark 5 (weird, but true). I hear it in a song. These are the gentle nudges that have led me to declare publicly that our stories matter and we should tell them.
Not wildly revelatory, but nonetheless completely true.
In this next series of essays and episodes, I’ll be telling a few stories. Some are mine, some belong to others, but are shared with permission rather than stolen via the world wide web. I’ll also be unpacking these passages of scripture and the way Jesus models storytelling a bit more.
What do these holy ways and words really mean?
How do we, as the redeemed and dearly loved people of God, actually tell our stories?
These are the questions I hope to answer soon and I hope you’ll jump into the conversation. I hope you’ll think about your story and I hope at the end you’ll find a way to tell it.
If you are wondering what she planned to do when he arrived and, surprise, it wasn’t me…you are not alone. A mystery forever unsolved.
Blue Letter Bible resource - https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/g3056/niv/mgnt/0-1/
I agree that there is such power in stories and am looking forward to reading your series.
And what a wild identity theft/catfishing that you found out about. I too had a Myspace page, but none of my pictures were set up a fake account worthy! 😂