A Story Within a Story Within a Story

I was taking one of my long walks, searching for answers.  Sometimes I prayed.  Sometimes I wrestled.  Most of the time I did both, out loud, as I walked to the park and back to work on my lunch break.  I was never interrupted and I am suspicious that it was out of fear of the fast-walking, angry woman who took the same route and argued with an invisible person between noon and 1:00pm, Monday through Friday.  It was the summer of 2016, arguably the hardest year I have ever experienced.  Knowing that it was time, I had left a ministry that brought me joy and purpose for 15 years.  The atmosphere at work had taken a bad turn. My dad died.  I realized that these things had contributed to much of my identity and I lost them all.  I was lost.  I began asking God, “Who am I.  I know what Your word says, but who am I really?”  I knew that I was a child of God, crafted by His own hands, dearly loved, worth dying for.  That is what the Bible told me.  But at this point, I realized that knowing wasn’t understanding or believing, and just knowing was not enough.

I was listening to 2 Corinthians with my earbuds, still asking God, “Who am I?  Who am I to you?”  Above the words of the narrator, I heard, “You are a story that I am writing.”  Those words echoed in my head for several more verses.  I could not recall finding them in the Bible before.  I grabbed my phone, went back to the beginning of 2 Corinthians 3 and played it again.  They weren’t there.  The closest thing I could find was 2 Corinthians 3:3, “You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on human hearts.”  It was all in my head.  But it wasn’t.

I had long believed that my life was a story that God was writing.  What I did was the story.  I believed it was true of everyone.  This was different.  This was new.  I don’t want to take anything out of context to prove a point.  I am only writing what I experienced and what I believe to be true.  God revealed that my existence is the story.  It wasn’t the answer I was looking for, but somehow, it was enough.

The Bible is the story of God’s pursuit of the people He loves.  Each life represented within the pages is a story that He wrote.  We are continuations of that same story.  The situations that we encounter within our lifetimes are stories.  Stories within stories within THE story.  And that year that shook my identity, shattered my heart, and nearly took my mind was a piece of me, the story that God is still writing to complete the grandest love story that will ever be written.  You are a story that is part of that story.   So take heart; the ending has already been written and it is a happy one.