My story, God's story...

It has been a week since my last post and I have my reasons. I headed to Kentucky last Sunday after church to the Asbury campus for a week long summer intensive. It was an awesome week and although it was now my 7th trip there I still longed to stay. It is such a Spirit-filled place, that campus, that town. It is absolutely a sign and foretaste of the Kingdom. Who wouldn't want to live there?! I am taking two classes this summer, one online "Communication as Christian Rhetoric" for which I will write speeches and sermons and have to videotape myself so that I can be critiqued by my classmates and so that I can critique them, and the other was this intensive, "Narrative Pastoral Counseling". This class was great. It taught me how to better care for the stories of others along with ways to help people tell their stories and own them.

So many of us believe the stories we are told about ourselves without ever knowing why, asking why, or writing our own story. Jesus Christ has rewritten the story of my life and I know I will never be the same. Stories inform and stories have the power to transform. Consider the Israelites in Egypt, they were oppressed slaves that had no stories of their own. They believed what they were told about themselves, that they weren't good enough, weren't worthy, weren't human, the Egyptian's story was their story, but God heard their cries, and God sent Moses to lead them out of their captivity and to rewrite their story forever.

Perhaps you are the Moses that God is sending into someone else's life, who has no real story of their own, that has believed they are who the world has told them they are, who believe there is nothing more than what they see going on. Perhaps God has heard their cries and is sending you to set this captive free?

The world deludes us into thinking God wants to be a part of our story, guess what, he already is, he created us, and wants to redeem us. The truth is we get to be a part of God's story, and we know how it ends. The question is how can we live into it?