Blending my story with God’s has always been disconcerting to me, especially in the moments when, quite frankly, I’ve thought the plot has sucked.
If God were really writing this, couldn’t he have spun things a little different? At the very least edit back in the part where I have a college fund?
I’m comfortable enough with my past story to say (and mean) that it humbles me. I can be left alone in the same room with it and we’re not trying to kill each other. I can talk about it, laugh about it, write about it, live in a travel trailer with it, but there are recesses of me that are still wary of it even after all these years of … cohabitating.
I cannot say my life story is part of God’s design.
It makes me uncomfortable to think I was conceived under the watchful eye of a God who stirred my life pot to include gender discrimination, bomb shelters and a lack of education and healthcare. And then spit me out a 21st century socially awkward girl who could claim nowhere as her home and who hated men.
I can’t reconcile the two – God + the undesirable elements of my story.
It’s not because I see God and my story as two diametrically opposed entities.
It’s because he was the force that kept me grounded to sanity, to love, acceptance, provision and protection while surrounded by a bunch of gun-toting, women-degrading crazies.
I cannot say he orchestrated these elements of my story because he is my friend. If he wrote it that means he controlled it, which means he could have stopped it and he didn’t. That is not my friend.
He was not a deity that existed in a superficial space above earth.
He was with me.
I knew then, as I know now, that his heart was breaking over me. I felt it.
My story broke his heart.
Donald Miller, the author of Storyline, tweeted: “I’m a strong believer God has put much of our fate in our hands.”
I’m a strong believer that the early portions of my story are the result of choices people made – choices outside my control.
And then at some point between weird-childhood-in-a-travel-trailer and healing I began writing my own story. I drew lines in the sand. This is where your power over my story ends and where mine begins. This is when I take my collective experiences, including the good and bad ones outside my control, and I pen a different ending.
Two years ago I started writing my story and I’m still writing it today. (Literally. That’s why I’m living in a travel trailer right now.)
In a week, I’m venturing into an online study and discussion of Storyline with a group of fabulous women headed by my dear friend, Kristin. It fits easily into this storytelling season of my life and I’d like for you to join us, if you want to.
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