I had the great privilege of speaking at the St. Louis Dream Center this morning. 6am certainly came a bit early, but it was beyond worth it. For those of you unfamiliar with the Dream Center OR any Dream Center across the country, they do an amazing hands on work in the communities around them. They go after the rough and tumble of society-- those who need the most help, both practically and spiritually. Speaking to their interns this morning, I encouraged them to tell their story.
We all have a story to tell, we all have details and secrets to share. Whether they are good, ugly, terrifying, beautiful, we must live from an honest space of our story. It's the only one we are qualified to fully tell, and tell it we must.
Romans 8 says "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose..." And that, "All things God works for the good" is the juicy part. We can easily identify the good and the bad, we know the ins and outs of our lives like experts, but the working part is the challenge. Coming to terms with the "works for the good" happens with courage and usually a lump in the throat to roughly quote Frost.
It is easy to stand on triumph, we want to tell the world of that, but standing on the dark spots, the failures, the abuse, the tragedy, the ways we have manipulated or perpetrated others is a task we'd rather ignore. Yet, God takes every detail and works it for our good. He makes our story which is ultimately His Story and makes it interesting, stirring, stunning and something to look at and read. But since people cannot read our thoughts, the only way that story is accessed is if we open our mouth and tell it.
Binary Opposition is an interesting theory I've slightly adjusted :) We know something by its opposite. We know Day because we have it's opposite in Night. Male/Female, Ying/Yang, Up/Down and so on. We read in Revelation 12, which is totally not imposing at all (sarcasm), the passage that says, "And they overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their testimony, and they did not love their life even when faced with death."
So, if we overcome with the spoken word, it seems its opposite is that we fail when we shut up and keep our stories, our details, to ourselves.
Frederick Buechner writes, "It is important to
tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are—even
if we tell it only to ourselves—because otherwise we run the risk of
losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept
instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the
world will find it more acceptable than the real thing."
We opt for "the acceptable" rather than "the honest." Sure, we all have chapters in our history that we aren't proud of, but they nonetheless are still there. All things, all things work together. You wouldn't read a book that had zero character development, nothing on the front of exciting plot with success and failure, so why do we expect that the acceptable is going to be treated any differently?
If we want to be the salt and light of the world, we ought to expect the flavors are going to be diverse, sometimes sweet, sometimes sour. Sometimes savory, sometimes bland. At times bold and other times subtle.
Whether we realize it or not, we are in fact telling the same Story even though we use different details.
To sum it up, Colossians 1 says it this way:
"You yourselves are a case study of what he does. At one time you all had your
backs turned to God, thinking rebellious thoughts of him, giving him trouble
every chance you got. But now, by giving himself completely at the Cross,
actually dying for you, Christ brought you over to God's side and put your
lives together, whole and holy in his presence. You don't walk away from a gift
like that! You stay grounded and
steady in that bond of trust, constantly
tuned in to the Message, careful not to be distracted or diverted. There is
no other Message—just this one. Every creature under heaven gets this same Message."
