We lead lives. We spend our whole lives doing it. You could even say it’s the only thing we ever do. We hope that there are good things left behind when we’re done with it: achievements or legacies or families. But at some point all of our lives will turn into stories.
A popular word in Christian vernacular is testimony. “What is your testimony” is basically synonymous with “Tell me your life story.” Testimonies are powerful, and testimonies are important. Your testimony is powerful, and your testimony is important. The stories that we have, as witnesses, of the ways the God moves are weighty tools we can use for His kingdom.
My squad and I just got back to Thailand from a month in Myanmar. A part of my team’s ministry was sharing our testimonies to the local church that we were a part of. We had a lot of events where we shared, so I heard my team’s life stories a lot. I got into a rhythm of sharing mine also. The frustrating part about sharing my life story corporately was that I felt dishonest summing up years of my life into a couple of sentences about struggles I had. Those struggles were definitely not the only things I experienced over those times in my life, but when I had five minutes to share that was all that I could include.
Testimony commonly refers to your life story, but it doesn’t always have to. When sharing my testimony last month I realized that it can be split up into smaller stories of how God moved in my life. I have talked in a couple of blogs about my biggest struggle with self-loathing in the past, but I never included a story from the beginning of my race about how that ended. Now that small story from the first couple of days on the race plays a big part of my overall testimony.
Before you leave for the world race you spend a couple of days in Atlanta saying goodbye to parents and learning from some last minute sessions. This span of a couple days is called launch. During one of the worship sets at launch we sang “Reckless Love.” I thought about how hard it was for me, still in the moment, to truly believe wholly that I deserved God’s love. It fits into my testimony. I had spent years thinking I was literally worthless. Even though it had been years since I believed that, I still struggled to accept God’s love. I knew I was a sinner, and even if Jesus forgave me for those sins I still couldn’t forgive myself. I knew God loved me, but I also knew that He loved everyone else just as much so I didn’t feel like it was worth anything.
The worship set ended and someone gave a message. I listened to the message and it pushed all the other thoughts out of my mind. After the message was over we entered into a time where people from leadership were walking around praying over each of the racers. I sat there in a crowd of people being prayed over when a woman I did not know sat next to me.
Earlier that day that woman, I later found out she was named Kate, had given a talk about the story of the rich young man in Mark 10:17-23. She focused on verse 21 when its says that Jesus looked at him and loved him before He told him to sell everything. Her point was that when the young, rich man walked away sorrowful he wasn’t just walking away from what Jesus said, but he was also refusing to accept Jesus’ love.
That was why she was sitting next to me in that crowd. She said that earlier that day, before she had ever met me, she saw a vision of me. In that vision I was refusing to accept God’s love, and that was hindering me. She went on to say that she saw me being a vessel of God’s power to masses of people and families were receiving God because of me. That’s what she said I could be but right now I was like the young, rich man refusing the love of Jesus. After she saw the vision of me during the day, she had approached some of the leadership on my squad and asked, “Does he know what he carries?”
I did not know what I carried, but I knew that what God was saying through Kate about me currently was enough to make me believe what she was saying about who I could be in the future. So I sat there in a crowd of 300 racers and wept. I felt like that was a moment where I said, “Fine God, I’ll believe what you say about me. I’ll try to love myself, and I’ll change my perspective to see myself as someone worthy of love.” I sat there for a long time. I prayed that God’s love would fill me up to the point where there wasn’t room for anything else inside me. I prayed that when I stood up I would be a changed man. I believed that God could make into a person with the ability to actually lead families to Christ, so I prayed that He would mold me in whatever He thinks would work best.
My race would not have been the same without this foundation. I didn’t even realize how important of a moment that was before we were asked to share our testimonies frequently. I kinda assumed that because I hadn’t struggled with self-hatred in a long time that that part of my testimony was finished. God helps us work through things that we may not even fully understand the depths of.
My interaction with Kate ended after she prayed over me. She took a step to walk away before turning back to me and saying, “I almost forgot to tell you, God believes in you!” That’s something I had never thought about before. I always thought it was supposed to be the other way around.
