I am beginning to understand more and more with each day's passing, the value of every person's story. I am also beginning to see how much I don't understand my own.
Lately, I've been reading many different books on that topic, about discovering who you actually are. I've read Cure for the Common Life and Facing your Giants by Max Lucado. Both deal with looking in the past and seeing what common themes run through them. I am reading To Be Told by Dan Allender, and I have several other books that really deal with the topic of knowing yourself. I am also in Men's Fraternity, created by Robert Lewis, and we are dealing heavily with wounds, scars, marks, and other shaping "devices" that have molded us into who we are.
Where I struggle and I would imagine most people would with this topic is that it seems bizarre to ask someone to discover their story. We all lived every moment of our story, so what would be the purpose of discovering it? But the more I look at my past, the more I don't understand what is going on. I can't even remember my past for the most part, so how do I look at it?
The value of knowing your story, knowing the common themes that run through it, is so that you may begin to write your own story from here on out - according to Dan Allender. At first when he spoke about me co-authoring my story with God, I thought he was a lunatic. God writes my story - He has everything planned out. But the more I began to think about a side, often controversial topic, I realized Dan Allender might be on to something.
We Christians have a hard time understanding Free Will vs. Predestination, and have an even harder time trying to explain it to someone who shoves it in our face for believing in something we don't understand. However, when Mr. Allender speaks about co-authoring with God, it seems to blend the two together. Now I won't say I "get it" but the more I think about it, it comes clearer. Our life will happen, no matter what. Circumstances will encounter us, and we will deal with them. However, knowing our past (our struggles, our victories, our passions, our defeats), helps us to succeed in the future. Take for example the girl who is very trusting. This is a good quality, but she doesn't understand why guys take advantage of her. Circumstances will still face her, she will meet guys in the future, but how she reacts to them can be completely different. If she began to understand who God created her to be - one aspect a trusting person (positive) -and she recognized the situations where she typically trusts someone who shouldn't be trusted, then she could avoid the situation - she has taken more control. She is no longer a just a character in her story, but rather she has also picked up the pen and changed the direction of her story. She is both Character AND Author. Now there are many debates for what I have just said - for instance God is STILL in control, and he predestined her to figure out her story and change, so therefore, she really didn't author her story. You have a point, and it is valid. But, I am saying for me, it is making the murky water - just that much more transparent.
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Rodney, I finished "To be Told" earlier this fall and liked it too. I take more a paradoxical approach to free will and predestiantion. I think trying to define it in our mind is like trying to explain Jesus being fully God and fully man. Clear passages on God being sovereignly in control and clear passages on us having choices to respond to His plan or not (like MT 23:37). Dan A. (who is a Presbyterian BTW) has a good way of explaining this mystery. Hope you see the story he is writing for Rodney and Alisha Keim!
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