Monday, May 13, 2013

Why sharing my testimony is terrifying

I shared my testimony last night to a room full of thirty teenagers.

It was the first time I had publicly spoken of several things, putting my shame and fears and hopes and dreams out on the table like a Thanksgiving feast for the skeletons that had been hiding in my closet.

Y'all, I was 63 inches of sheer panic.

A couple of times I paused.
"Something's wrong. Something's not right."
Breathe, kid. Breathe. You're not breathing.
Take in air. Take in new life.
Exhale the shame, inhale the grace, and wait in the wonder of vulnerability.


A really wonderful friend and partner in crime ministry classmate carefully reminded me that my testimony is really not about me at all, but about God and his story.
It is about identifying how God is moving in real time, in a real place, in a real person.
Even a 20 year old girl on the western slope of Colorado in 2013.

I do not own God's story, and therefore, am not entitled to keep it to myself.
God owns my story, his story.
History.

Buechner talks about the bible as this awful, boring, confusing book full of self-righteous toolbags, murderous whores, whimpy leaders, whiny blame-shifters, and a God that seems to want to smite everybody, including himself (let's not get into a conversation about the trinity for the moment), for the glory of himself.

Some book.
Some God.

But that's exactly what it is.
Some book.
Some God.
Some story that keeps telling the story of ourselves.
The story of a people who do every single thing wrong, but are still given grace from a God who sacrifices himself.

Yes, for glory.
Glory hallelujah.

The bible, our testimonies - they're about saying "Me too."
"Me too. I don't understand what all of this means, but I am with you. He is with you. Breathe."

And that is perhaps what makes the story of God so terrifying.
It is the story of us. All of us.

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