Knowing Your Story Matters
Knowing our story matters. It is incredible how easy it is to live each day fragmented from the overarching story God is writing in my life. I can engage each new day without realizing my story and how God is writing it. I quickly forget the days before and how they inform or shape my new day.
By not knowing my story, I can allow pieces of my story to negatively shape my thinking, decisions, relationships, and even my understanding of who God is and not be aware of its shaping power. This is a lot of authority to give the events of my life unknowingly.
Why is it important to know my story?
It helps me recognize God’s hand in my life, allowing him the power to shape me and bring transformation. When I live a fragmented life, not recognizing God’s story, I give moments in time the power to shape me over God.
It lets me see how God has worked in my story, realize how he is working in the present, and where he is leading me in the future.
By living with a holistic understanding, my life story equips me to finish life well.
Remembering and reflecting on one’s story is essential. The first thing Noah and his family did when the flood ended was build an altar and give thanks to God for delivering them. Jacob built an altar to remember God’s revealing himself. Genesis 35:7 says, “He built an altar there, and called the place El-bethel, because there God had revealed Himself to him when he fled from his brother.”
Altars were piles of rocks that served as reminders of God’s faithfulness and as a marker to remember God’s presence in their story. This is a practice we need to mimic in our lives. We must understand how God works in our story and set “altars” up to remember his faithfulness and life-transforming power through his presence.
How do we do that? Knowing and writing out our own story or life map is one way. I want to suggest four steps on how to understand, process, and write our story:
Reflect and Journal: set aside time to remember and reflect on your life. We are so busy moving from place to place, task to task, and event to event that our number one mistake is not to create a space to remember and reflect on our story. Our time has so much demand on it that we often live day to day and can’t recall significant events in our life. This is where journaling comes in. If I can take a moment at the end or beginning of my day to consider what is happening and what emotion is created within me and write it down, I now have a record to reflect on. This record can prove significant in my future life.
Develop a Timeline: Create a timeline of your life-shaping events, both positive and negative. Get a poster board and draw a line marking it from birth to current age in the middle of it. Using sticky notes, determine significant moments of your life and put them in order of occurrence on the poster board. The events of your life that are negative place below the line. The events of your life that are positive place above the line.
Understanding your story: There are two critical pieces to this step. One, find a trusted friend or confidant with whom you can share your story. If possible, share it with more than one person in a single setting. When we share our story aloud in an environment of trust, something significant happens within our brain that allows us to process our story to a place of health. We begin the process of taking control of our story versus our story controlling us. While daunting, this single step of sharing our story aloud can bring us freedom. Second, you may consider seeking out someone equipped to help you process certain parts of your story. Yes, I am declaring that a wise person seeks counsel. Somehow we have adopted a belief that counseling reveals weakness. But it shows wisdom and health. At True Hope Collister, we have access to counselors who can help you on this journey. You can connect to this resource by clicking here.
Identifying Your Values: The goal of our story is to recognize God at work and identify the things that have become important to us through knowing our story. My story led me to a place of understanding my calling and how that calling is to be lived out. While not being a natural people person, both positive and negative aspects of my story placed upon my life a value to truly do life with others and fight for community that functions as a healthy family. This process led me to one of my life verses, 1 Thessalonians 2:8, “So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us.” The point is to determine what the pieces of my story reveal about what I value most important in my life. Write those values down.
Knowing my story led me to engage painful memories. But the journey ultimately led me to freedom and purpose. And not just any purpose but an eternal purpose. I firmly believe that the same awaits you on the other side of your story as well.
As you engage your story, let us know how we can help—praying for you!
Pastor Matt