Last November, the seminarian student originally from Romania called Lumi came and told us her story. If you have not heard Lumi, you can listen here:
She left us with an assignment—to figure out how to tell our own stories. Lumi is scheduled to return in April—what will she find? It is my hope she will find us preparing feverishly to tell our stories — first in church to edify each other, then outside. Toward that end I invite you to participate with me in a free online class called “Storytelling for Change”, available herehttps://novoed.com/storytelling-change . It will use about 3 hours of your week for 10 weeks. We are told in Revelations 12:11 that we will conquer evil not just by the blood of the lamb, but also by the word of our testimonies and being willing to tell our stories, and not to love our lives (aka our reputations) so much that we are afraid to give our testimony.
To quote Roger Williams:
Overcoming Evil
God’s people are all over-comers
When they fight with God’s weapons
In God’s cause and worship
In Revelations 2, 3 chapters
Seven times it is recorded
To him that overcommeth in Ephesus
To him that overcommeth in Sardis
And so on…
Revelations chapter 12
God’s servants overcame
The Dragon or the Devil in the Roman Emperors
By three weapons
The blood of the Lamb
The word of their testimony. And
The not loving of their lives unto death.
Reference: The Bloudy Tenant p. 190 Volume 3
For some the conversion or recovery of faith story makes an obvious testimony, for others not so much. Suggestions for where to look for your story include Bible verses you find difficult and the journey to understanding them. Also consider times where your fellow Christians have provided insights and assistance in your Christian walk.
For example, last week in Sunday School, I was sharing my uneasiness with Genesis 12-13:2 — that Abram is judged righteous and yet he got his livestock, silver, and gold in essence from selling his wife to sleep with Pharaoh. I was corrected — Rich O’Reilly has this way of knocking of you upside of the head in one sentence so cleverly you don’t realize it for a few hours…and he said something like: no the riches came later, when he asked her to go to Pharaoh it was to save his life. Which changed everything. For when I went to pray, it was 33 years ago and the truck was blasting Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” as my other half was sharing he’d need laser eye treatments for $600 a week to MAYBE save his sight—a sum higher than Mt. Everest to us then on our teaching assistant salaries. And the only way we found to do it was for me to take an engineering job I’d been offered on the East Coast—to sell-out the use of my brain to corporate America as I saw it then. And I did. And if you doubt the disgust level we felt, understand that in math each concept builds on the prior like a complex house of cards, and time away is like knocking house of cards from your brain structure. They said “If you don’t study it now you will never study it again” I can still hear my prof saying “ You will never again be pristine, you will have rotted your brain”.
I studied for engineering exams in waiting rooms of hospitals in New Brunswick and eventually at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore while waiting on his eye surgeries to complete. My company paid us more in medical benefits than they did in salary. When he was blind I learned leadership skills so that we could still backpack remotely alone. And when he died I felt I lost not just my spouse, but my reason for living on the east coast or anywhere, and my faith. The return to faith is another longer story. My point here is that out of that experience I was blessed—with skills, with resources from a career that lasted 33 years and enabled everything else I’ve ever done and what I’m about to do. And while that job has as of last year ended, God still calls on me to use those skills and resources toward his Kingdom, and for now that means telling stories.
As we used to say in cycling, sometimes it’s your turn to take a pothole for the team, so that the whole team does not go down. How can I look down on Abram or Sarai? We were both immensely blessed out of difficult challenges with murky practical solutions, and we both at points in the story feel completely inadequate to God’s call.
I invite you to join in submitting stories to the collection “We are All Overcomers” with your life experience and testimony.
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