Only You Can Tell Your Story

For you, LORD, have delivered me from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling, that I may walk before the LORD in the land of the living.

—Psalm 116:8–9

If you’ve been sitting quietly, hoping that someone will start speaking a language that makes sense to you, may I suggest that you are that person? If you’ve been longing to hear a new language for faith, one that rises and falls like a song, may I suggest that you start singing? If you want your community to be marked by radical honesty, by risky, terrifying, ultimately redemptive truth-telling, you must start telling your truth first.

I’ve spent my life surrounded by deeply gifted pastors, great leaders, and brilliant preachers. I understand the temptation to simply let them continue telling God’s story. I settled myself into the back row, certain that a girl like me had nothing to contribute, and that everything in the world that needed to be said was being said by people like them—extremely talented, polished people who never seem scared, who know the systems and the forms and the formulas like the backs of their hands.

But there is one thing that those pastors and preachers and leaders cannot do, one thing they can never do. They cannot tell my story. Only I can tell my story. And only you can tell your story.