When Do You Finally Tell Your Story?

Everywhere you look lately, you read or hear about people telling their story. The question is when do you finally tell your story?

Whether it is a story of success, recovery, or disastrous brokenness. Everyone has one to share. Until recently even I hid behind the pages of my story. Burying the pain, awkwardness and sin behind the curtains so that no one could see. It was not that I was any better or any different from anyone else. My story was my story, or so that is what I had been conditioned to believe.

It was not until I was able to face my past head on that I could finally breathe, at last, give my story to Him to read.

 

Although He was the author all along, scripting my every step. I spent most of my life trying to edit the ink with a pencil and eraser.

Not until on bended brokenness, was I was able to kneel down amidst my filth and give Him credit.

It was not until I faced my mortality in a third world country, years later that I finally was able to give Him the glory, and truly humble myself into serving others.

For years, I occupied a pew in one church or another. I went through the motions year in and year out. Attending mass because I felt it was the only way I could make it through the week. It became more of an obligation than a source of repentance. I felt unforgiveness within the walls of the church, a place that should be a sanctuary was full of judgment. Not for the sins of the past week or even the week to come. It was the anger, dirt, and sin of generations that I dragged through the doors on Sunday mornings that burdened me.

Never feeling worthy of a father’s love, whether earthly or otherwise. It was not something I experienced in my life so accepting it from someone I could not see was ridiculous. I turned to everything this material world could offer. I buried my pain in booze, technology and living a distracted life. I walked away from the church, from my faith, from everything that mattered.

Nothing mattered, I was lost and alone.

Years passed as I wallowed in my self-loathing, faithless lifestyle. Relationships were like a passing novelty, friends no longer mattered. I buried myself in my work, focused on my lies I told myself. Faith, better yet God, seemed all but a distant memory. One that I prayed would fade when I woke up from my nightmarish existence.

It was not until I met my now bride many years later, when she posed the question, “Would I like to go to church with her?” It was then that I began to wonder if there was a God that I had been missing.

A long journey, full of mistakes, pain, years of anger, and seeking forgiveness of things that I did not yet understand. A child who now was an adult, I slowly learned the acceptance of my father. Once you come to the realization that His love is unending and that it can heal even the deepest of scars.

Once I was able to find the forgiveness I sought I was, in turn, able to return the same forgiveness to others. When you forgive, you are in turn able to begin to live for others. Living for others and putting their needs before their own is the way we were all created.

Imagine the world where you wake up in the morning with the first thought of who may I be able to serve today? One where your prayer in the morning is that God places those in need in your path that day. Learning how to live second, and putting the needs of others first, by keeping God as your one focus, everything else in life becomes easier.

When I came to the realization that Jesus, my Lord and Savior, came to earth and died for me, and you. It was then that I realized the purpose I was made for, and that my story was just beginning. All the pain I lived through made me who I am, molding me to share my story, use it to help others heal.

How about you, do you have a story that you are ready to share? We all have one, it is simply a matter of when do you finally tell your story?