What’s Your Story?
By Lexi Cole
"Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there."
Psalm 139:7-8
My fiancé and I just finished our wedding website. We chose the layout, verbiage, pictures and colors. It’s a reflection of who we are and the process has been fun! One part of the website is “our story.” Here, we were able to tell the complete, “full-detailed” version of how everything happened – from how we started dating to how he asked me to marry him. While it was time-consuming, it’s been fun to have friends mention that they loved reading “the whole version.”
We all have a story. We all have happy parts of our story - - times of joy, abundance and blessing; we all have harder parts of our story - - times of struggle, trials and pain. And yet, while our stories may look different one from the other, the God we share doesn’t change. He is faithful in the joyful times, and He is constant in the trials. I’ve seen this in my own life - - my own story - - but we can also see this same truth in the story of Scripture. The Bible is filled with stories of people who celebrated what God had done for them, as well as people who cried out to Him in times of pain. And yet, through these hundreds of stories, we see a constant thread of God’s being there in every story. He is faithful and constant in His presence with us…in the good times and bad.
Psalm 139 sums up so much of what Scripture tells us about our God’s involvement in our lives. He’s with us in our stories of blessing and in our stories of struggles. He is there with us in heights and the depths. And because God is there with us in our story, He knows us. He created us - - we are fearfully and wonderfully made. The psalm ends with the declaration, “How precious to me are your thoughts, God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand – when I awake I am still with you.” [1]
What’s your story? Are you in a time of blessing? Are you in the midst of a storm? We’re all in spiritual process, but no matter where we are in this journey, we serve a God who doesn’t change, who is there with us, and who knows us intimately. Writing Andrew’s and my story on our wedding website was a lot of fun…but I love that it was a reminder that, in the midst of our story, God is there with us.
GOING DEEPER:
1. What’s your story?
2. How have you seen God work through the good times and the struggles?
FURTHER READING
Psalm 139
Lexi is a senior Elementary Education major at Bethel University
