One of my favorite books is a book called, ‘John.’ It’s a book that translates the narrative of Jesus Christ into a narrative that is more than a fact-driven story. It’s a narrative full of poetry, symbolism and relate-ability.
In the book’s eighth chapter, there’s a passage that talks about testimony. In the passage, Jesus is having a conversation with some of the community’s religious leaders about mistakes, guilt, punishment and pardon. After that conversation, Jesus elaborates on Who He is and why He has knowledge, authority and wisdom on those topics, to which the community’s religious leaders question His story. They question His testimony. Jesus answers as only Jesus can, by saying He is Who is His and He is witness to himself that His story is true, for He alone knows where He comes from and where He is going, and the leaders have no place to judge those things because they do not know where He is from or where He is going.
And Jesus makes several good points here, but one that stands out to me is that others do not have the authority to judge our stories when they come from Truth. Others cannot fully judge what they cannot fully know, and therefore, our stories - our testimonies - are things that we can hold onto as Truth when the world questions and doubts.
I’ve always been someone who struggles with holding onto Truth and with holding onto my own story. But there is one piece of my story that I always go back to when the Truth I hold onto seems to be questioned the most, by myself or others.
A few years ago, myself and a group of friends were coming back from a road trip to Portland from Seattle when our 2002 Jeep broke down at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. We felt stuck, since no one knew anything about cars, and we were still several hours from home. It was late at night, and we knew the likelihood of getting one of our friends in Seattle to drive down and fetch us was slim to none.
So, we prayed.
We did the most cliche of Christian answers to solve what seemed like an extremely minor worldly problem.
Not 30 seconds after we finished our prayer, we saw the door of the truck stop diner up the street fly open, and a burly, bearded man walk out, a typical trucker if there ever was one. He looked at us from the door and immediately started walking our way.
When he reached us, he asked if he could help.
He said, “You guys looked like you were having some car trouble, and I think I have the fix. Why don’t you try inserting the car key into the outside, driver’s door lock .From there, try locking and unlocking it a couple times.”
As we all looked around at one another thinking, “There’s no way this works,” it worked.
Immediately after the engine roared back to life, the guardian angel turned around to leave with a low-key, “Looks like that did the trick. Y’all be safe.”
This is one of the moments I hold onto as part of my story, my testimony. A small, but truly answered prayer in the heat of a moment. Both unexplainable and explainable, but a moment that I refuse to chalk up to circumstance and a moment that others can’t argue with because it happened to me, for me, to share.
I believe we all have some of those moments, religious or not. We all have pieces of our story that shape us into who we are, what we believe in and that are un-arguable. And I think we should tell those stories more as we hold them tightly, not in ways to convince others or win arguments, but in ways to convince and remind ourselves of who we are and who we were created to be.
-Cliff
Cliff’s Note: “Even when it feels like God is absent, He is with us. He is always working, turning the world’s bad to His good.” - Tim Keller - And God is using story to do so.