A Telling Story - Guest Blogger
By Wil Triggs
It can be awkward. Talking about yourself. I mean, I’m really not that interesting, am I? And frankly speaking, you probably aren’t either.
We’re just people.
Is it a surprise that the hardest stories to get people to do are the Eye Openers in worship and the I Believe stories in Connections. People love to listen to them or read them, as long as they are on the listening or reading side, not speaking or writing side.
Your story of faith isn’t really your story. Sure, it’s about you. And no one else can really tell it like you can, because it happened to you. But it’s not really about you, is it? It’s about Jesus saving you. It’s really about Jesus. Without him, there is no story at all.
Think about your story not as your own bio pic, but as an original story with Jesus at the beginning, middle and end. Here’s a bit of my story.
A long time ago, in a parking lot far, far away, no. This was before there even was a Star Wars.
I was sitting in the passenger side of the old blue Dodge with my brother-in-law. This car would one day become mine, but I didn’t know that then. It was his car, for jaunts to church or seminary or other errands, not the big family car we normally drove when we were all together. He stopped by his college for some reason, and I was with him. I can still smell the SoCal heat in that car mixed with a little dust and that recently turned-off car smell. We were talking.
If there was anyone on earth that I could trust to say these things to, it was him.
At that moment, I was the unhappiest I think I had ever been. I wanted to flee my home because of my dad’s drinking. Things got better, but I didn’t know that then. I didn’t want to make my parents feel bad or leave my school, but I couldn’t see a way out. So on weeks when school was out, I fled to the homes of other family members.
I don’t remember what I said in the car, but we ended up talking about the nature of the cosmos. It was an admittedly roundabout way to address my situation. He explained to me how protons and neutrons were charged. They were opposite. They should move away from each other instead of somehow being attracted, somehow holding together.
I didn’t get it. What did any of that mean? Was the point that, at its core, the universe itself was some kind of contradiction? Maybe it was just some bizarre mystery that didn’t quite make sense. Just like my unhappy life. I sound like a whiner, I know, but I was somewhere in my teens when this happened.
I looked out the window and stopped talking.
Then he handed me a Bible opened to Colossians and asked me to read Colossians 1:17 out loud. I took the Bible from him, looked down, and with the sun shining through the windshield onto the page, I read:
“He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together,” I said.
This verse is easily read over in the longer passage, but for me all those years ago, there was a different kind of charge in those words. The living Word was starting to do something.
If Jesus was holding every together—in terms of science, yes, but not only that. If Jesus is holding together the universe, if he is in every particle, then even in my hard situation, he was right there. Even in every scary moment now, I was not and am not alone.
If there was anyone on earth that I could trust to say these things to, it was the third person in that car with us. The One who could help me hold it together. The One who loved me even then and he loves me now. How can the story go untold?
You have one, too.