Stories are powerful. From books, to movies, to father's sitting with their children at bedtime and making up an adventure tale, stories have the ability to touch us deeply. Stories of courage can motivate us to be more courageous. Stories of people who persevere through dangerous and difficult circumstances can inspire hope within us to believe that we too can find the strength to face our own hard times and come out on top as a better, stronger person just like those in the story. Stories have the power to change us. But there is another kind of story that we often fail to see as powerful or life changing; our own.
As a Christian, the stories I have been most helped by are those personal stories of other people who have faced similar circumstances and struggles in life to my own but who have been powerfully transformed by God through those struggles and circumstances. I think we all recognize the power of other people's stories to motivate, inspire, and transform the way we ourselves think and live. But all too often we believe the lie of the devil that our own story doesn't matter, that no one wants to hear our story or could relate to our story, that God can't use our story to make a difference in the lives of others. I believe there are two primary untruths that people believe regarding their own story that keeps them from feeling free to share it with others: 1) that their story is too boring or 2) that their story is too awful to share with anyone.
Some of the best stories of God's power at work in someone's life are those stories that people might be tempted to label as boring. Stories of people who, from childhood on, have dedicated their lives to God and to His service. People who never went down dark paths of sin or had to be restored from deeply broken places because of the bad choices they made. I have been blessed to have known some people like this and their stories of lifelong faithfulness to God have been a great source of help and encouragement to me. So if that is your story, don't believe the lie that it's not an important story to share with others. Use your story to glorify the power of God to keep people from sin and to encourage others that their stories matter too, even if they might be tempted to believe their stories aren't exciting or dramatic enough. It's not about how dramatic a story may or may not seem in the eyes of other people, it's about God being glorified through your life and His amazing love and power to keep you! Your story matters! Don't believe the lie that your story is too boring to make a difference in someone else's life.
Personally, I have believed lie #2 regarding my own story. Some of my earliest memories from childhood were that I could never let anyone know who I really was or they would reject me and not want to ever have anything to do with me again. I believed that I didn't belong anywhere. I felt like I didn't fit in with my peers, my family, or the church, and the biggest lie I believed was that even God didn't love me. In fact, I believed for many many years that God hated me; that the struggles I faced within were God's way of punishing me and letting me know how much He hated me for who I was. Year after year I went through life believing that my story, who I really was on the inside, was too awful to share with anyone. And year after year, I felt rejected by God and by everyone around me. Not because they had rejected me, but because I believed (falsely) that they would reject me if they ever even suspected who I really was on the inside. And since I knew that God already knew who I was on the inside, I believed the lie that He had already rejected me.
If you're reading this, I hope you won't be too disappointed to learn that I'm not going to share every detail of my story today. Some of you already know my story and will understand what I've written in the above paragraph more fully than those who have never heard the details of my story before. My purpose for today isn't to go deeply into my story, but to say that I'm recognizing more every day that God has a purpose for me that includes my story. It's not that God has decided to overlook my story and use me anyway but, rather it's through my story that God is going to work through me in a more powerful way. I don't believe God intended for me to experience all the years of pain that I experienced. Much of those years of pain were the result of my own choice to believe the lies the devil was telling me and my own decision not to trust God. Someday, I may tell my story more fully on this blog or in some other public way. For now, I want to simply tell about how God has been working in my life over the past year to show me how He wants to use my story to open doors of ministry to others so that they too can find the same freedom in Christ that I am experiencing more fully in my own life with each passing day. In July of last year, God moved me from Indiana to Kentucky through a job transfer. At the time, I knew God had given me a wonderful job that I really enjoyed and I only thought of the move in terms of God blessing me by allowing me to keep the job I loved. But God had something much bigger in mind than I could have ever imagined!
I've been in church all of my life, so it was just a natural part of the process for me when moving to a new area to look for a church to attend. I confess, I had no big expectations at all for church or for my own involvement in church. I've just always gone to church and so I wanted to find some place that I would at least feel comfortable showing up on Sunday mornings for 90 minutes or so each week. When I first walked into the church I now call home, I walked in with a lot of discouragement and very little faith that church would ever be anything more for me than simply a place to warm a pew for a short time once a week so that I could say I had done my duty as a Christian. I walked into church intent upon having as little expectation as possible because I believed expectation only led to disappointment. I wanted to simply blend into the woodwork, not be noticed, go back home, and to repeat that pattern week after week while I lived out the rest of my life outside of church. God had something else in mind.
Even though my plan only involved blending into the woodwork, on that very first Sunday at the new church, Pastor Brent said he would like to get together with me sometime and that he wanted to get to know me and my family better. I figured it wouldn't hurt anything to meet with him one time. The thing I hadn't counted on was that he wanted to keep meeting with me...regularly. It's been less than a year but I've lost track of how many times we've talked together either through a planned meeting or just at a church activity. I don't remember what we talked about in that first meeting, but I know it wasn't too long before Pastor Brent got to know a very discouraged man with very little faith or hope for the future. In those early days, I suppose it would have been easy for Pastor Brent to give up on me; after all, I had mostly given up on myself. But he just kept asking me to come back again and again. He never set an agenda for me to change or pressured me to move more quickly that I was ready to move. He just loved me and listened to me talk...for hours. Slowly, I felt more comfortable sharing more of my story with him. Even though I expected nothing but love and care from him, I still remember how scared I was on the day I decided I was ready to share the hardest part of my story with him. It's always been difficult for me to share those dark parts of my life with others because I almost always come away from that level of sharing with an overwhelming sense of shame. Not just shame over what I have done, but shame on a deeper level, shame over who I am. Sharing my story, no matter how well people receive it, has typically brought a feeling of shame and despair that's so deeply rooted in the core of my being that I feel worthless. Even though I know in advance that the devil is going to attack me with those lies when I share my story, I still never seem adequately prepared for those attacks.
As time went on however, God began to bring hope and restored faith into my life. Week after week, God began to change my heart and mind and bring healing to deeply broken places within me. Today, I can honestly say that I am not the same man who walked into a little Nazarene church in Columbia, Kentucky for the first time 11 months ago. In fact, I can honestly say that I'm a radically different man today! Honestly, I can't even wrap my head around what God has done for me over the past 11 months. And I believe that this is only the beginning of what God has planned, both for me and for Columbia Church of the Nazarene.
And that leads me back to the power of sharing my story with others. God is beginning to open doors for ministry that I have long wanted to do but had mostly given up any hope of ever doing. As I see these doors beginning to open, I'm both excited and a little scared. I know that a part of doing ministry will be a willingness on my part to allow God to use my story to minister to others who have experienced the same type of pain and brokenness in their lives that I have experienced in mine. I'm not sure that telling my story to others will ever be easy, but I do believe it is worth it. When I think about how the stories of others have impacted my own life, I know it's a great honor to be called of God to share my own story so that others can be pointed toward the healing and redeeming power of God. God has radically changed my life in just these few months. I can't wait to see where the next year leads me. None of it is about me or my abilities. On my own, I would still be sitting back trying to blend into the woodwork, hoping no one ever asked me to get more involved. But with God, I'm excited about ministering to others. I'm excited about being a part of what God is doing in Columbia, Kentucky. God has given me a new heart; a heart that wants to love others and point them to Jesus because I want them to experience the same transformation that God has brought to me!
So, that's just a little snapshot of what God is doing in my life and how I know He wants to use my story to glorify Himself and to work through me to provide an avenue of grace for others to find their way to Jesus. God wants to use my story in His kingdom work. And He wants to use your story too. Most of us will never write a book or speak to large audiences where we share our stories with large numbers of people at once, but we can all be vessels of grace by simply being willing to share one-on-one as God leads us to share. My story can make a difference. So can yours. Let's be surrendered so completely to God that it becomes easy for us to recognize when to share our stories with others. My daily prayer in recent days has been "God, allow me to recognize what you are doing in your Kingdom and make me aware of those around me who need to hear my story so that, through my story, they will be led to the love of Jesus for them and to the transformation you want to bring to their lives." Stories are powerful. Stories surrendered to God are lifechanging!
