I feel like this idea of our stories being powerful has been coming up a lot recently. I met Tiffany the other day and we were able to just have a short conversation on experiences that we’ve had in our lives. After exchanging the few pleasantries of small talk, Tiffany asked me what I do with my life and how I’ve gotten there. I told her about doing the World Race and how since then, God has started putting a vision on my heart to help mobilize the local church. Again, I don’t know what people expect from that question, but they never really seem prepared for my answer.
It was her turn to answer the question and I could tell she was kind of shying away from it. She told me she was still in college and wasn’t too sure where she was headed or what she would do with her life. I think sometimes the mystery of the unknown is our illusion that we don’t have to do anything right now. She quickly turned the focus back to me and asked more about the World Race. I told a few stories, but I could tell there was something more she wasn’t realizing in her own story.
As I told her about working in one of the orphanages in Central America, she quickly said, “Well I got to do that once. In Guatemala.” So, I told her she had been places and her response was, “Yeah, but not like you.” I asked her if her trip to Guatemala was any less powerful or meaningful because she met me. She told me no. Then I asked her why she didn’t feel like it was important to tell me. Tiffany told me that since I had been to so many places and done so much that it didn’t feel as important.
How often does this happen? How often do we diminish our own testimonies because someone else sounds so much better? I meet people all over that have given their lives for 20 years to serve a group of people in a foreign land, and I’m coming to help out for three months. Sounds like I’m in Tiffany’s boat then. There’s a level of competition that plagues our church and it hurts the individual members.
Your story is your gift from God that no one else has. Don’t try and fit into some mold of a good Christian, a good man, a good wife, a good American, or a good whatever. Of course, as a church, we are called to community, but that doesn’t mean you’re just a number. You have a story to tell and a life to live. So stop letting someone else dictate to you what success is. There are people all over the world that need you. They need the Jesus that’s in you, but they also need the gifts that you have. As an image bearer, you have something to offer.
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image,according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the [fn] sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over everycreeping thing that creeps on the earth. God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
Genesis 1:26-27
