The power in telling it as it was, how it shaped you, and how it will no longer

There is a story I tell when I learned the power of story, that as I told it, the story itself unravelled and became what it was; a fiction.

The reality with the story, of course, was real. I made meaning of it, so I’d made of it a reality; one that stood up wholly by the testimony of my nodding yes to it.

I had a story that was filled with words and lines and paragraphs and pages for what I thought others thought of me. Their facial expressions and gestures and even their words would at times fill my mind. They stayed for a long time. Even now, they sometimes make a little cameo… before I bid them farewell once more.

We all have stories. Most of them are very unhelpful. And it’s only when we get into a room with a trusted confidante or counsellor, where we’re asked to pour the contents of our story out onto the table, where we put labels on the pages, that we see the plot.

As we tell the stories of what actually happened to us, somehow a miraculous thing happens. Even as tears flow and we trust our quivering chin to the words that teem forth, a beautiful therapy is taking place; those things that happened to us, we find, no longer define us. They happened, but only what happened, not what we made of them. The harrowing power dissipates and dissolves.

Even as we utter things we had resounding on our hearts for years or decades—those utterances that were destined to be converted into sound waves.

And into the ether of a physical world, those realities are sieved. The real remains, and that real is us. The terror that threatened to interminably torment us rots away, because there, in the telling, is God’s way of restoring us to who we were always made to be.

The power in telling it as it was, how it shaped us, and how it will no longer, is part of the one conversation, and the less power we give our past the better. We stop enabling it. It was how it was, sure. It has shaped us, most definitely.

And that shaping process, of all things, we can be thankful for, because we would not otherwise find ourselves challenged to the point of searching for the truth if not for that which has shaped us.

Our stories cause us to search; they manacle us to faith in search for hope; through such trauma, they’re the vehicle of redemption, and they will take us all the way to our restoration.

See how God has purposed to restore us
THROUGH what the enemy did to destroy us?

God redeems us as we expose the devil’s schemes.

Fear not the story. Fear only the silence. Find words for what might feel indescribable. Settle for gibberish if that’s what comes. Smile at the enemy and know you have his measure.

That story wasn’t formed in you to crush you; the story graced you so that it would motivate you to move toward freedom.

Your story is not destined to keep you where you are. It’s destined to get you where you’re going. And where you’re going is into others’ stories, where your redemption connects with theirs to give them hope. So, thank God for your story.

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash