Please Write It For Me

This week I have (get) to share my testimony. Our school staff do this regularly on Tuesday mornings, and being new, this week is my turn. It’s a sweet practice and one that makes sense to me. I love hearing other people’s testimonies. I love hearing their stories. I love hearing about God’s grace in their lives, and I especially love to hear the varied ways he is at work—pursuing and drawing through so many wide and varied circumstances and people.

But I’m terrified about it.

I wish I had a better story, a more dramatic story, or perhaps even just a clearer one. Because if there’s anything a testimony should be, it is the story of God’s work in your life. Of things lost and then found, or broken and then restored, or blind and then miraculously able to see.

Eugene Peterson has a beautiful book called A Long Obedience In the Same Direction. It traces the Psalms of Ascents (Psalms 120-134), the songs the Israelites would sing on their way to Jerusalem. They are songs of lament and longing, of hope and rejoicing, of belief that one day we will look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. I am only 44 years old and have no idea how many years I have left, so I hesitate to say sweeping statements about my life, but thus far, it does not appear dramatic, exceptional, or especially moving. If I were to use a book title to describe it, A Long Obedience In the Same Direction seems about right. Maybe I would rephrase the title, An Endless Slog Going Who Knows Where. But people would think me dour.

---

When I was studying for my M.A. in Creative Writing, I had to take a class on writing memoir. One thing you learn is to shape your story through a particular lens. Maybe it is a theme, or an event, or a slice of time that you are crafting into a narrative. Not every story has to begin with birth and end with what happened yesterday. This probably seems obvious. At times it felt questionable to me. If you can craft your narrative not only by choosing what to leave out and what to include but also by interpreting those events, the result seems ripe for both a lack of self-awareness and possibly dishonesty.

But there are so many good examples of memoir as testimony, crafted and told carefully and sparingly through a particular lens, that are not narcissistic or self-serving. An essential component for pulling this off is writing without bitterness. You know it when you see it— that hint of resentment, of demonizing, of setting the story straight. I remember hearing Philip Yancey say, in reference to writing his beautiful memoir, “Where the Light Fell,” that you cannot write about people if you are angry with them. You cannot write about them if you have not forgiven. And I think that must be true across the entirety of your story if you are to share it in a way that is true.

---

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but Josh had to write the outline of my testimony for me. This was nothing more than an act of support on his part, as I was painfully falling apart in front of his eyes, lamenting that I have no story, and whatever story I do have I feel too confused about to share in any coherent way.

The truth is, I just needed someone to place a hand on my shoulder and say, here is your life. Look. Do you not see Him there, and there, and there?

I think I’m always on the lookout for a God-shaped world, for the “world charged with the grandeur of God” in Gerard Manley Hopkin’s famed poem. But sometimes my feet cannot feel, “being shod.” Sometimes I struggle to find my footing in this world. In other words: I get weary.

Then I read over the words someone else wrote down about my life. Someone who knows me well. And I start to see the faithful, patient presence of a Father looming in and around the quirky steps and missteps. I smile to think of the drama I created, the drama I was mercifully spared, the ways I thought I knew so much and have learned time and again how very little I know. The next however many years of my life will likely be filled with much the same.

---

Think of me on Tuesday, shaking in my little ankle boots, if you will. I am going to try to be clear and honest about who and where I have been, and the ways God’s grace has found me.

Soli Deo Gloria.

(and thanks for reading)

~Christine