Our Stories: Seeing Through the "Before" and "After"

By amazon Thursday, September 19, 2019 Comment Edit

Our testimonies should point to God's faithfulness even before our conversion.

Much ink has been poured into the power of personal testimony—as it should. We live in a world of story, of narrative. For millennia, we have been calling people into the grand narrative that we call Scripture. We’ve used what God has done in our lives to invite people into a bigger story.

“I once was blind, but now I see,” for all of its glory is often way more complicated than it sounds. We have obstacles both inside and outside to understanding our stories and what God is up to.

For many of us, “I once was blind, but now I see” is our echo through the hallowed halls of both institutionalized religion and a skeptical world that can easily strip us from seeing the creator of our story—God himself.

Just a few days ago, our staff went through the sometimes-painful-but-always-inspirational practice of sharing our testimonies of how we came to faith. They were as varied as each person—from early-life conversion to finding Jesus just outside the pit of hell.

For some, it was easy to share, even natural. For others, old wounds reemerged and threatened to overwhelm. In his Requiem for a Nun, master writer William Faulkner writes this pithy line: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

So true. Our personal testimonies, as one of my friends recently commented, are our “pearl of great price”; they are the key to understanding a good part of who we are. For better or worse. Even in Galatians 1:13-24 we read of Paul’s testimony:

For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people and was extremely zealous ...