There have been a lot of things throughout training that have made me feel like Forrest Gump (“…so I went to the White House again, and I met the President again.”) I know I’ve written about Life Stories/Testimonies before, but I’m going to do so again.
For the last three years, Life Stories have been a big part of Quito Quest training. Some people make a distinction between a Life Story and a Testimony, but I think our vocabulary around here is more to keep from scaring the Methodists and Episcopalians. At any rate, every day during training, we have heard one or two life stories from the various summer staff and full-time missionaries. Today was my day to share.
Now (being Methodist), I didn’t even know I had a testimony until I was about 21 years old. And I’m still not particularly fond of sharing it. Especially when I have to go after somebody with the sob-inducing kind of story. I joke around sometimes that I wish I had done drugs or something so my testimony would be more exciting (not even remotely funny, I know, Mom).
One of the things I’ve realized over the course of the last four years, though, is how God works in every experience in our lives. I had a really good resource sent to me when I was preparing to tell my story at IT training two years ago1, and it is really cool because of that being able to look back at some of the things I never realized at the time impacted my life and my ongoing journey of faith. It’s also cool to see the questions or comments I get later and see how even though I feel sometimes I don’t have much to say, it still allows me to impact people and for all of us to connect as we find out things about each other.
My friend Dana wrote a blog post about this very phenomenon last year. As she put it after a day of testimonies at a you event, “Through powerful testimonies we were able to better see God’s characteristics like His provision, faithfulness, tenacity, and love.”2 Those words are much more eloquent than anything I can come up with with this much sleep-deprivation, but that’s how I’ve felt this week, even with my lingering apprehension up to my turn this morning. What we do here as missionaries is never about what we do, but it’s about what God does in and through us, and it has been a lot of fun finding out about some of those works I never would have known of otherwise.
1Going back to look through related blog posts, I realized that it was exactly two years ago this morning that I was giving my testimony in Elgin, IL. It’s interesting to notice how my attitude and what I include in that story have changed between telling my story to Rich, Kelsey, and Ted, and telling it to a room full of Quito Quest staff today.
2I’m planning on getting her permission to use those words after the fact. It’ll be fine. She knows she loves me. And my bloggy-mcblog-o.
Thanks for the posts. I have enjoyed reading them and I finnally get to use my RSS feed app for my droid haha.