Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Begin Again is for people in the second half of life who sense that the identity they've been carrying no longer fits. Host Winston Faircloth — spiritual director, daily poet, and fellow traveler — brings honest conversation, personal story, and original poetry to the journey of remembering, releasing, and returning to who God created you to be. Visit www.myreuniontour.com for more resources.
Welcome back to Begin Again. In the last episode, I walked you through the four maps that formed the remember movement of this journey. The maps that helped me see the terrain of my own life in a way I could never have before. I told you where those maps came from, And I shared with you that I wanted you to meet the person behind the maps. And today that's exactly what we're doing.
Winston Faircloth:Sibyl Towner has spent more than fifty years in ministry and spiritual formation. At College Hill Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati, Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago, and for years now, she and her husband Dick have co directed the Springs Christian Retreat Center in Indiana. Sibyl trains and guides spiritual directors. She's walked alongside hundreds of people in the most honest seasons of their lives. Sibyl is also my spiritual director.
Winston Faircloth:She was with me across the hardest years of my journey. The collapse, the silence, the slow work of finding my way home. She didn't fix anything. That was never her posture. She listened.
Winston Faircloth:Sibyl has this amazing gift of presence. So much wisdom. So much hard won life experience. She asked me honest questions. And at the very beginning of our journey together, she shared with me the OneLife maps, a tool that she has spent decades sharing, and which has become the entire foundation of the REMEMBER movement you've been hearing about here in season two.
Winston Faircloth:To begin our conversation, I asked Sibyl to take me back to before the maps existed, to what she was noticing in people that made her think there had to be a better way to help them listen to their own lives. On my last episode, I shared my perspective on the One Life Maps that you were co author of and guiding force behind. Take us back to before the maps existed. What were you noticing in people, whether it's College Hills or Willow Creek that made you think there has to be a better way to help people listen to their own lives?
Sibyl Towner:I really began listening early in ways I didn't even know. And I think it was really by living life. I think some of my first conscious memories,
Sibyl Towner:very young, my grandmother took us to the church when we came here from Germany. And the people in the church loved us. And so that tangible expression in that church really made me a believer. All I knew that I was loved. So I never got over the church.
Sibyl Towner:And I took my brothers and sisters to the next church when we moved to another city with my mother and new stepfather. Church was about half a mile from us and took them to that church. My parents didn't go regularly. They went sometimes. That shaped me into an embodiment and a place of faith, not a place of perfection.
Sibyl Towner:In college, I left home and said, I'll be back when I'm 21. When I have all the answers to life. I wrote to my stepfather who really had not known how to show love. I don't think he was shown love well and thanked him for what he had tried to give me and forgave him for what he was not able or did not give me. That action set me up.
Sibyl Towner:I didn't know it at the time, but to not choose other ways of being accepted or loved. I wasn't somehow I was protected. So that action, I've really doubted who God was at that time. And I was having conversation with God by the end of my college career, realized some of the things I wanted didn't happen. And I went into the chapel and said, God, are you telling me that you know me better than I know myself?
Sibyl Towner:It was one of my maturing steps. I had surrendered to Christ, but this was a surrendering again. You know me better than I know myself. How do you want me to be with this, what I didn't get? How do I live with this?
Sibyl Towner:He showed me that was a remarkable year and was very fruitful. Then I was working in camps all those years and I was a resident counselor and I was listening to people's stories. I was drawn to them. I learned not to try to make someone a Christian. That was God's work.
Sibyl Towner:But my work was to listen and validate their story. The scriptures certainly influenced me deeply in that regard, but one of the other books was a book by Paul Turnier called A Place for You. He said the quest, a young man came to him and said, I'm looking for a place for somewhere to be. And Paul said, that is the quest at the bottom of each of our lives. He said something else that was so key for me in listening to people.
Sibyl Towner:You cannot leave a place until you have a place. So what began to form inside of me was creating a place for people to be who they were as they were. That I couldn't have verbalized that fully to you at that time, but I knew this was right. And it didn't work in the confessions of faith that young people were being called. They were being called to give, to commit their lives to Christ and then to give up everything.
Sibyl Towner:And they didn't have anything to give up. So I was thinking, no, we need to give to them. Then God will ask to give up. Does that make sense?
Winston Faircloth:It does.
Sibyl Towner:So that was happening to me at those times. I didn't know it was unusual. I just knew I felt so strongly about it. So some of the ways it played itself out at camp, I said, every kid has to have their name on the bed when they come. They have to know there's a place for them.
Sibyl Towner:Now, we can change the place. They can say I don't want an upper bunk or a lower bunk, but they have to have a name that this is their place. Those kinds of activities were really important. Would say in a camp, if I don't know your name by three days, I'll make your bed. So the kids couldn't wait to come and say, do you remember my name?
Winston Faircloth:That's a tradition you carry on today when you host people around your table.
Sibyl Towner:When the experiences that you've been a part of, that whole table experience, you need to come in and know there's a place for you at the table. We don't have place cards at the other meals because if we did it at the other meals, it would feel controlling. The people need to have agency and choice. But that first time when we're awkward and we bring whatever we've brought with us, we don't need to think about that. We just need to know there's a place for me and I can go there.
Sibyl Towner:And the other thing, I don't try to do fancy things every time. It's the same set of good dishes. It's the same linen and it's the same vases with flowers for each season. So it just says to me, don't put on the dog. This is about hospitality and hospitality is inviting the stranger into the inside circle of intimacy.
Sibyl Towner:And so it's about knowing and being known in Eastern culture, you laid down your arms and the other aspect in Jesus, in the Jewish tradition, the table was a place of repair. So this is where relationships were repaired.
Winston Faircloth:So this sense of finding your place, is it that sounds like a spiritual foundation to what became the maps.
Sibyl Towner:I had been doing this story work with college kids, and a friend, we were doing a retreat, came and had an early dinner with her and she poured out her story, a three hour dinner. She was an organizational development person and had worked with Compass And as we talked, she mentioned that resource and that they had done an individual exploring your story. And out of that conversation with her, she said, I wonder if we could get together and take this resource that was a non Christian one and take part of it and redo it. So we went to Compass and said, we'd like to use, this is your intellectual property, and we would like to deliver it from a Christian perspective and actually do some changes. And they were permission giving at that point and said, just keep us informed, which we did.
Sibyl Towner:And then we eventually struck a deal with them where for every map we give them 10% of the cost to honor what they had done. And so Sharon Swing and I put that together and got a group of people together to test it and say, does this actually work? And it was extraordinary. I remember that first time in a retreat setting where we had six or seven people who had done the, my life story map and what it unfolded in them. But then the other way the journey came, I was known by somebody who was in World Vision and Leadership Network was drawing together some people to say, what can we do for women?
Sibyl Towner:Now this resource is for men and women, but leadership network was using halftime for their, that was the founder. And anyway, leadership network invited me to come down and explore what could be done for women. A whole host of pretty high powered women were there. I felt like the, I slipped in the back door. And at the end of it, Margie Blanchard, Ken Blanchard's wife, I had said, here's something we're working on.
Sibyl Towner:She took a look at it and said, I don't think we need to reinvent the wheel. Let's try this. And so did that with them and then Leadership Network said we'd like to do it with our leaders and then it unfolded and we self published and anyway, it's still alive 25 later with three edits on it. And now the real life process owns it and it is in a really good place. I think it is being well stewarded and has the potential of another season of life.
Winston Faircloth:And I believe an upcoming Spanish edition.
Sibyl Towner:Yes. The Spanish edition is already done. It's now how to roll that out in a way that has the integrity of somebody Spanish speaking who can help others in using it.
Winston Faircloth:Then I asked Sibyl the question I'd been saving up. She spent her whole life helping others listen to their stories. We heard the map surfaced in hers. In your own personal journey of using the maps, what's been the most impactful? Have you been surprised about anything that you've learned in doing the maps yourself?
Winston Faircloth:There's a bit of a Yes.
Sibyl Towner:I would say that for me, the integration of my story, and I think timing, or there are times where we are not ready. There is a readiness of exploration. And very often it comes out of a hard moment where we wonder what's it all about. Often at the beginning of midlife, in our thirties, we're beginning to say, why am I not getting over this? And I think for me was that aspect of belonging.
Sibyl Towner:My father was killed in World War II in Russia. And so I'd never met him. My life there had never been talked about. It was a whole unknown. And Dick had a work trip in Europe and thought, I think we need to see if there's any family there.
Sibyl Towner:Uncovered my father's brother and family. They could not wait for us to come and took us to all the places where my parents were married. Anyway, opened up a whole piece of life I knew nothing about. But what happened to me when I was there, everything I experienced in my first five years, my body reacted. I thought I was going to die.
Sibyl Towner:I realized I didn't think there was enough, plenty of food, but I was fearful that there wasn't enough food. Then my uncle took me to a factory, a clothing factory. And he said, I want you to pick out an outfit, something you would like. So I did, and it was a sort of a lavender ish two piece top and skirt. And he said, try it on.
Sibyl Towner:So I tried it on and the way he looked at me and said the kind words, I love how that looks on you. And I felt came from my father. It was just an endearing experience. So I began to process those aspects of lack of food, fear of death that showed up in wanting to drive the expressway or being fearful of driving the expressway. Anyway, a host of things and just entered a healing space growing up.
Sibyl Towner:And since I'd never had men that I could trust, I experienced healing prayer where someone gave me a picture of picture Jesus holding you and looking at your uncle who rejected you when you came to this country and looking at him and telling him who you are. Didn't dismiss my uncle, didn't say that he ought not to have a place, but giving recognition to who I was and with Jesus holding me, it was the proper balance. It wasn't a little five year old with a six foot seven. He was as tall as you are and he wouldn't speak to us. So again, a continuing integration of my story.
Sibyl Towner:And grieving, grieving parts that not ever getting to know my father, actually losing my mother because the war devastated her. And those parts of my life were totally missed in my growing up years. So in naming those and grieving them and owning them, allowed God's grace and goodness to grow up in my life and make up not replace, but make up what I didn't receive.
Winston Faircloth:Sibyl, this tool has been such an integral part of my journey, and I enthusiastically take people through the maps because of what it's done for me. When I think about the movements, especially the first four maps of taking inventory of what's going on in the present, recapping that life story of our past, going to those mountaintop experiences and looking for commonality in those different experiences, and also in the valley. The four movements together are just so powerful and can give one a really clear picture of their life. There are other maps as well, but those first four I find particularly valuable. What have you noticed in terms of people experiencing the maps and the kinds of transformation that it makes possible because you know your story.
Winston Faircloth:You begin to integrate your story.
Sibyl Towner:That quote in the My Life Story Map from John Mobuchette, the use of the word remember. Re, along dash, member. So reflecting on our stories allows us to realign because most of us live wobbling, think of four wheels on a car and we can get to places, but they're not in alignment. That remembering allows a realignment, lost dreams, things that need to be let go of places where there have been gifts that we've just never recognized. So that remembering it's a critical word in the scriptures.
Sibyl Towner:Remember is a remembering who you are and to whom you belong. Actually, the key that happened to me before the maps were formed, that I was in the mind and heart of God, before I entered into this world of brokenness, and that I'm going to God, And that invites me in how to live. Now my story in this space of birth to death is not the whole story. There's a God who's been at work before and a God who will be at work when I take my last breath here, that will take me. So that remembering, and here's one little story, a gal came and doing the map and she said, I can't remember my story up to age 13.
Sibyl Towner:Lived on the streets and part of her family was incarcerated. I said, I'll tell you what, you put a heart around that section of your life. And in the middle of that heart put held by God. Out of Corinthians 13, when I was a child, I spoke like a child, I reasoned like a child, but when I became an adult, I put away childish things. That has to be in remembering.
Sibyl Towner:I need to know what to put away. And then it says, I only know in part, but what I know is that I'm fully known. Fully known. So that led me to say held by God, He fully knows. And so I'll never know everything.
Sibyl Towner:Key things have been put together, but there are things I still don't know. But that doesn't, I'm not hounded by that. And then faith, hope and love. So it lets me accept the whole of my story as is. And that is the birthplace of hope.
Winston Faircloth:You gave me a lot of hope as I recall that season too, because one of the things you would say to me, the message I've received was every part of my life will be useful in God's kingdom. That was a very hopeful statement to me. You remember the dark season I was going through at that time. Moment, when you said that to me, was so hope giving and so true in later years as the journey has continued. It's been even more true in this new season that I'm entering now.
Sibyl Towner:And creation speaks to us about that. I'm sitting here at the kitchen table and as I look out, I'm looking at the barn and the manure. Our lives, if you just have this pile of manure, there's gonna be a potato plant or tomato plant that grows out of it, but it isn't gonna do much. But this remembering Dick takes that manure, takes it out the field, and spreads it out and lets it dry. And then goes back out and takes it and puts it on the place where he's planting plants.
Sibyl Towner:And it transforms and fertilizes the earth. So I just said there's nothing in my life that God cannot transform for good. Nothing. The worst of the worst.
Winston Faircloth:Next, I wanted to return back to the OneLife maps. I had this question for Sibyl. It's such a powerful, inspired tool. You had that conversation with Sharon so many years ago that prompted you to go down this path and so many thousands and thousands of people who have been impacted by this.
Sibyl Towner:Winston. Sharon is an integral part and she would certainly be somebody that would be wonderful to have a conversation with in what it has meant in her life. Then a Rebecca Madden who did the editing with us. It was certainly not a work that was done by one person. It was a community effort.
Winston Faircloth:Last question. As you think about that season that so many people are stepping into, I think many of the people I'll be connecting with are transitioning and releasing that old identity around career or other identities and stepping into this new season. What would be any noticing or any other advice that you would give for folks who are maybe restless and maybe uncertain about this change?
Sibyl Towner:Recognize it. Again, the things that you have said, keep circling. The remember, the recognize, the release, and unite. Those keep going over. So remember who you are and this dying before you die, you're investing into the next generations.
Sibyl Towner:I think one of the key things is have I let go and grieved all that has needed to be grieved? Is there anyone with whom I am at odds with, known or unknown? You cannot be integral, whole, if you have hate for someone. And so how do I have a clean energy as it relates to all of my relationships and to groups and people unknown to me but whom I have anger or ill will towards examine that.
Winston Faircloth:There's so much more to this conversation with Sibyl. I'm saving some of the nuggets for later episodes in our series because she spoke into all four movements of the My Reunion Tour journey that I have experienced. So you're going to really enjoy hearing from her again in upcoming episodes. Thinking about this conversation, there's a moment that I've been sitting with for a while. Sibyl talked about her table practice, and how every time someone comes to The Springs for the first time, there's a place for them at the table.
Winston Faircloth:I'm going to get to enjoy that again here in just a few days. She saves that place for them at the table, not because she needs to control where people sit, but because she knows what it feels like to arrive somewhere and not be sure there's a place for you. She said, hospitality is inviting the stranger into the inside circle of intimacy, both knowing and being known. In the Jewish tradition, she told us the table was a place of repair, a place where you laid down your arms, a place where relationships were restored. That brought me back to the One Life maps.
Winston Faircloth:What the maps actually do. They don't solve anything. They don't fix anything. Yet they create a place, a sacred place, a place for your story. All of it.
Winston Faircloth:The parts you're proud of. The parts you've been avoiding. All to be laid out, seen, and held. Every story has a place. Your story has a place.
Winston Faircloth:And that's why Sibyl helped co create the maps to say. And it's what the remember movement of the My Reunion Tour Journey is all about. Giving your story a place before you're asked to release any of it. You cannot let go of what you've not yet named. You cannot grieve what you've not yet honored.
Winston Faircloth:And you cannot honor it until you've given it a place at the table. Such a powerful beginning of remembering, recognizing, release, and reuniting on your journey back home to who God created you to be. So if today's conversation with Sibyl stirred something in you, if her story gave language to something you've been carrying, check out our show notes for links to learn more about the journey, to schedule a conversation with me, to read some of the hundreds of poems that I've published over the years of walking this out. That link is not a sales call. It's just an honest conversation on where you are right now.
Winston Faircloth:I'm happy to share that if you'd like to learn more about OneLifeMaps, perhaps even getting a subscription for yourself, visit 1lifemaps.com. And I'm also excited to share that Teresa McCloy, the founder of the Real Life Process, who now stewards the One Life Maps in her organization, will be a guest on an upcoming episode as well. This work she did with the maps was so foundational to the purpose driven life that she's living today. She's got a great story to share. So thanks for listening to the Begin Again podcast.
Winston Faircloth:Subscribe wherever you listen to podcast. Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Podcast, anywhere. And if today's conversation reminded you of someone who's been wondering if there's a place for their story, make sure to share this episode with them. I'm Winston Faircloth, and you're right where you're supposed to be.