What's Your Story?
I thought Blogvember would go like this: me waking up at 5:30 each morning to calmly and collectively share my thoughts with you.
Instead, it’s gone more like this:
Alarm goes off at 5:55 and I’m too tired to get up.
Press snooze a few times and get out of bed at 6:30.
Brush teeth, make breakfast, head to the couch.
Decide prayer is more important than writing this morning.
Close eyes, open hands, say prayers, get ready for work.
Go to work.
Work late because it’s year-end season.
Leave work at 5:30.
Bike home in the dark.
Get home, sit on the couch for 25 minutes.
Make dinner, hang with the hubs, procrastinate because ...writing.
Frantically write a post before bed and then stay up two hours too late because you delayed your writing time.
Tweak Wednesday’s post on Thursday morning and then share it with the world.
Aw, crap. It’s Thursday. I’ve got to write another post.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Last night I said to Dan: “Blogvember is hard! Why did I do this? I just finished one post and now I have to write something else for tomorrow!”
His response? “Yep. That’s how it goes.”
He then reminded me that they don’t all have to be good.
“Remember that one drawing?” he said, referring to his Inktober challenge during the month of October. “The point is just to do it.”
The point is to let people in, to let them join me in my day-to-day.
I’m curious — is there anything about your life that you find interesting? If you had to blog everyday for a month, what stories would you tell?
My friend and fellow writer, Manda Carpenter, likes to say that there’s not a person you wouldn’t like if you just knew their story.
In Christian circles, we tend to limit people’s stories to their testimony. That before, during, and after Christ formula that’s supposed to be a one-and-done thing. But I don’t believe that’s how it works anymore. I believe God’s grace unfolds. It renews. It’s a process and our testimony is made new every morning.
Back when I believed in a single-story testimony, mine would have sounded something like this:
I was born in 1987 to two loving Christian parents who raised me in a Christian home. I went to church every week and really liked going to Sunday School on Sundays and VBS in the summers.
One week when I was 6, a couple of my friends got baptized and I felt a little left out. I remember walking down the aisle towards my mom after the service was over and crying. She asked me what was wrong and I couldn’t explain it. I wanted to get baptized like my friends, but somehow, I knew in my heart that wasn’t how it worked.
Me, right around age 6, model posing in my Jellies with new Bible in hand
Over the coming weeks, I must have had several conversations with my parents. I have flashes of memory— sitting on my bed and feeling loved as they listened, them taking me to our pastor’s office so I could talk to him and he could make sure I understood the gospel.
“So are you saying you’re ready to believe that Jesus died for your sins?” he asked.
I nodded my little brown-haired head.
I prayed the prayer and was baptized a few weeks later. I wore a giant white robe and my mom stood in the wings, just where I could see her, as I stood next to Brother Joe in the adult-sized baptismal. The water was cold that day because the heater was broken. I stood as tall as I could on my very tip toes and braced myself as he dunked me under.
“Good thing I’m such a good swimmer,” I thought. “There’s no way water’s getting up in this nose because I know how to blow my bubbles out.”
Life, apparently, changed in that moment.
It’s a really sweet story, now that I’m typing it all out, one that I should probably revisit and embrace more often because I 100% believe Jesus when he says we should all become like children to enter the kingdom of heaven — innocent and sweet, honest and unfiltered.
That story, though, was only the beginning — the very first testimony in a long line of testimonies. And I don’t mean that in a “walked away from God and then rededicated my life” churchy-church kind of way. I mean it in a “God’s mercies are made new every morning kind of way”— a we are humans and we’re learning and growing and stretching, and God’s mysterious love should constantly grow and stretch and grow and stretch and grow and stretch us kind of way.
When I worked for Cru at the University of Missouri, our staff team would get together every morning for something we called “Fresh Bread.” Jesus called himself the bread of life so our director wanted us to share what fresh bread, what fresh Jesus, we had experienced that week.
My fresh bread this week would be a few encounters I had with my friend Bre. She was the hands and feet of Jesus for me: a blog post she wrote that made me feel less alone, these photos she took that revealed God’s breathtaking beauty, a phone conversation that gave me permission — permission to grow, permission to fail, permission to ask questions and stumble head-over-heels deeper into the depths of God’s mystery.
So tell me….what’s your story? What’s your fresh bread today?