Engaging Scripture

Today’s guest post is once again written by Lisa Bartelt as a follow-up to last week’s post.  We thank Lisa and her husband Phil for sharing their lives with us!  

The past two Sundays at Faith Church, we’ve shared stories of restoration. Personal stories from the teaching team of how God has taken broken, hurtful experiences (ones we’ve caused and ones done to us) and restored lives.

So, why tell those stories? We certainly didn’t have to tell them. We could have lived among you for years and not shared our painful pasts. And the telling isn’t necessarily easy.

But it is important. Here are three reasons why we told (and continue to tell) our stories.

First, it follows what we read in the Bible. Toward the end of John’s Gospel, he writes, “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20:31) Later, in his first letter, John writes again, “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us.” (1 John 1:3) The Old Testament, too, is full of commands to tell redemption stories. Tell them to the next generation. Remember what He’s done. Tell about His power so that the nations will know there is a God.

We tell our redemption stories so others believe there is a God who does the impossible. He restores.

Second, and sort of related, we tell our stories to heal. Ourselves, and others.

I’m reading a book right now by Neil Gaiman called The Ocean at The End of the Lane. There’s a scene where the main character is remembering a time when he and a neighbor girl encountered a creature in the woods. The neighbor girl spoke a foreign and magical language to the creature, a song of some kind. He says he has dreamed of the song, and in the dream he knows the words. Then he says this: “In my dream, it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real, because nothing said in that language can be a lie. … In my dreams, I have used that language to heal the sick and to fly; once I dreamed I kept a perfect little bed-and-breakfast by the seaside, and to everyone who came to stay with me I would say, in that tongue, ‘Be whole,’ and they would become whole, not be broken people, not any longer, because I had spoken the language of shaping.”

By telling our stories, we are saying to each other: Be whole. We are speaking a language of shaping, of turning brokenness into beauty, of seeing God use our hurts to mold us into someone we couldn’t imagine being.

Third, by telling our stories, we give other people permission to tell theirs. None of us are perfect, but it’s so easy to look around and think everyone else has it all together and we’re the oddball that doesn’t.

If you heard our stories these last weeks, you’d know that’s far from the truth.

This quote I saw on Pinterest recently puts it another way:

Our prayer and hope is that this series of restoration stories would not end here, but that we all would continue to tell our stories. To each other. And, if the Lord leads, to the church as a whole.