Stories and Stakeholders

I have a large extended family. My grandpa had three sisters and a brother; each, in turn, had kids, grandkids, and even great-grandkids. A lot of people. I’m currently scanning back issues of our family newsletter to distribute via email. That right, we have a family newsletter. Actually, we have two; a newsletter and a family chronicle. Genealogical trees, fiction, horrible (in retrospect) teenage poetry, jokes, stories, and even puzzles were included.

My family is a family of storytellers. And I love it. There is something humbling about knowing that the people I only know as “Grandpa” or “Great-Aunt” were once my age; with the same passions, the same troubles, the same heartaches, the same hopes and fears. That my great-uncle once cut down his grandpa’s (my great-great grandpa’s) mailbox in a fit of childish anger. That my grandpa got his younger brother a job at a creamery. That my mom went camping with her parents, just as I went camping with mine. It’s reassuring to know that people and interactions really don’t change. It reminds us that we all have a story in common; and while I may barely know my second and third cousins, we all come from the same stock and that connects us.

I’m writing a paper for school right now about the responsibility of digital preservation, and I spend a lot of time talking about the different types of stakeholders there are. Before we can come up with a solution to a problem, we need to identify the stakeholders. We need to know who’s involved with the issue; we need to know who is connected.

Is digital preservation really all that different than my family? Is my family all that different than the church? Are stakeholders the same as common stories? I loved having my family because I knew that I was never alone, and that all these people would love and accept me no matter what I did, simply because I was theirs and a part of their story.

Sound familiar? We are God’s, and He is ours, and we are each other's. We all have a common story; we all have a stake in each other. Before we can even begin to solve any of our problems and show the message of Christ, we need to understand this basic issue. Before we can save other people, we need to understand our stake in other people. It’s a heady thought, to take what I get from my family and end up with the most basic fact of life: That we are all a branch of the same family and take part in a transcendent story; of love and sin and redemption.

Once we understand that, then, just as I love my cousin who’s made some pretty bad decisions, or my third cousins even though I’ve never met them, it should be just as easy loving a Muslim, or a lesbian, or a drug addict, or whomever, simply because we all are human. We all have a Common Story.