Story Engineering

Story Engineering

Early in my ministerial career I flew to a university town to interview for a job as church pastor, and the person on the search committee who picked me up at the airport happened to be a professor of soil engineering. Having a few civil engineers in my family but not having heard of soil engineering before, I asked this gentleman, “So, what does a soil engineer do?”

As only an engineering type can, he enlightened me with a simple, clear answer: “Everything on earth sits on soil.”

From that moment on I not only learned what soil engineering is but I also realized that everybody probably views their livelihood as having universal scope:

Garbage collectors spend their work days grasping trash cans and the fact that everyone on earth produces garbage.

The staff at the child care center next door must surely appreciate that all human beings start out as babies.

My neighbor who works as a builder knows that people need buildings and buildings need people to build or repair them.

Another neighbor, an avid gardener, is ever mindful of the seasons and the weather.

Teenagers operating with too many hormones and too little sense think that they’re the first generation in the whole history of humankind to discover sex and sarcasm.

Even phone scammers and internet trawlers, hedge fund managers, religious leaders and charity executives that have huge incomes, and authority figures who cover up each other’s abuses—they undoubtedly see the world as full of individuals who just sit next to their phones or computers waiting to be scammed, or want to invest in something that’s too good to be true, or are willing to contribute to a pack of lies, or could care less about justice.

The folks who run the local crematorium—they certainly understand everybody dies sometime.

Coming from a family of civil engineers I inherited a love for simple, clear answers. Even when it cost me personally. In high school I enjoyed math—truth be told I enjoyed every subject in school, except for physical education but that’s another blog article. My career in math began when I helped a classmate with her 8th grade algebra homework and she pointed out that I should be in this class too, rather than in the regular math class. So I went to the guidance counselor who switched me to Algebra I, after which came Geometry in the 9th grade and Algebra II in the 10th grade. I will always be grateful to my classmate for putting me on the path to more math because I needed it to go to college. But I noticed that as the math classes progressed, the number of students dwindled to about a dozen of us, and the female students boiled down to me in 11th grade Trigonometry and 12th grade Calculus.

Me—who was regularly serenaded by the guys in my math class with, “Lindsay Biddle looks like a fiddle, sharp at both ends and flat in the middle.”

Me—who the math teacher once asked in front of all the boys, “So, Lindsay, are you going to the prom?” And I had to answer aloud, “No,” because no one had asked me, and none of them ever did.

Me—who got teased when our teacher announced that our state math test scores had come. One of my fellow students said, snidely, “I bet Biddle got the highest score.” Among my classmates I did do the best, but it didn’t ease the pain of being set apart for ridicule.

And educators wonder why there aren’t more females in mathematics or the hard sciences.

Then one day in college, after my third semester of Calculus, math stopped being my career choice. I was still drawn to the challenge of understanding complex problems and figuring out solutions, but I needed them to involve more narrative than, say, X equals minus B plus or minus the square root of B square minus 4AC all over 2A.

I needed stories.

I found stories—inside and outside the classroom—to be way more visceral than mathematical proofs. Words come with more flesh than symbols, and sentences carry greater weight than equations. Stories get down to the illogical truths of reality and, in my experience, offer some meaning especially when things in life don’t add up.

Stories tell us lots—simply as well as subtly—about our selves: the selves who relay the stories, the selves who take in the stories, the selves who are characters in the stories, even the selves who are left out of the stories.

This makes me a story engineer: Everybody on earth has a story. And each person’s story is both telling and touching, whether they pick up trash or change diapers or have their diapers changed or tear things down or build things or plant seeds or harvest fruit or act out or lie-cheat-steal-abuse or remove metal pieces from our ashes. In the end, our stories are all that’s left of us.