Hey Everyone,
I apologize for the fact that I forgot to post while I was away. It was a crazy time, and I learned a lot, so I want to share a bit of it with you all.
For those of you who have read the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, this quote may be familiar to you. It is from The Horse and His Boy.
"Child, I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own." - Aslan
When we first arrived at DTS, one of our assignments was to write something called a "weekly reflection". In the first one we were asked to write about our personal theme for DTS. I've loved this quote for a long time and it had stood out a lot to me in the months leading up to going to Switzerland. It ended up being what I chose as my personal theme for my time there.
I didn't really know what it would mean for me or what the goal was in choosing this. I wasn't even quite ready for the journey that would follow in the next few months. It sounds like such a grand thing to have God tell you your own story. I spent so much time watching other people's stories unfold and being amazed at the beauty of it all. In the middle of it all, I just wanted to be the one who had a cool story. Maybe I had chosen this theme as a challenge to God, to show me something that I had never seen before in my life. I wanted to have exciting stories, so many things learned, and to be a super strong person because of what God would show me. What I learned and what this theme actually taught me was nothing compared to what I thought it would be, and it was so much more beautiful.
I had God tell me my story. It was not Him showing me things I hadn't seen before in my life, it was Him showing me things that had happened already in a totally new light. It was a really wonderful, but humbling experience. There have been things that I've struggled with, and in God telling me my story, He showed me where some of those struggles began. There were so many times that I would think, "Where did this fear come from, and why is it so strong?" And in those moments when I would try to figure out where it could have come from, it just seemed foggy. In the most unexpected ways and at the most unexpected times, God would show me what had formerly been so unclear. He would bring up some memory or thought and I knew that He was showing my where in my life these things originated. In showing me that part of my story, it made it possible for me to begin to overcome my fears.
At the part of the story where this quote came from, the main character, Shasta, first encounters Aslan. When Shasta tells Aslan about his life, he says that he must be "the most unfortunate boy that has lived in the whole world". Aslan's response to this is to tell Shasta of how he had been there during the times that Shasta would have counted as "unfortunate", and how those times were actually used to bring good things. This is what I found it was to have God tell me my story, it was to have God tell me about the things that had happened in my life, and how it happened from His view. He showed me the ways that He had been with me in the moments when I didn't think it was good. For all of the days that I believed the lies that I wasn't good enough, or that I wasn't wanted, God showed me how He was with me in those moments, and how He viewed me, which was different from the way I viewed myself. It was hard to actually take time to look in depth at my life and have God break down the lies that I had believed. It was to have God break down the misconceptions of events in my life and rebuild it in a way that was built on the foundation of who God is and how He views me.
God really loves every individual person so much. In Him telling me my story, the thing that stood out the most was this simple little thing that God said all throughout, "I love you." If you ask for God to tell you your story, He shows you so much of how much He loves you and sees your life as a beautiful and full of potential.
Thank you for taking the time to read my rambling thoughts, and I hope to write more soon about other things that I've learned over the past few months.
