What If I Don’t Want to Tell My Story?

I’ve been talking a lot on this blog about the importance of telling your story. But what if your story is painful, and you really don’t want to go into all that?

In 2006, my book How Big Is Your Umbrella was published. In that book, I talk about the things that we yell at God when life stinks, and what God whispers back. And I explore my journey in losing my son.

It wasn’t a fun book to write. I was a mess for several months, and it was hard on my family. It was as if I was reliving Christopher’s death all over again. And then the radio interviews started.

I wasn’t in a strong emotional place simply because of going through the process of writing the book. I really didn’t want to have to take time out of my day, when I was doing well, and do all these interviews where I would have to relive it once again. And when I spoke to different groups, I dreaded having to do it, too.

But then I realized something, and this may sound harsh, so bear with me.

It’s not about me.

At one point I was complaining to a rather in-your-face Christian radio host about my reticence to do these interviews, and he laughed right at me and said, “get over yourself, Princess.” I was downright mad. This was my son we were talking about! But he went on to say, “If you want to have a ministry and if you want to impact people, you talk. If you don’t want to impact people, don’t. But don’t do all this squishy stuff.”

Now obviously the guy had an excess of testosterone, but the more I thought and prayed about it, the more he had a point. And so I have talked about Christopher as much as I can. Everytime I speak, in fact, I tell the story of getting the phone call from the doctor to say that there was something wrong with his heart. I talk about what it was like to realize I was going to have to watch my only son die. I talk about the morning that I handed my son to the anesthetist before surgery, thinking I wouldn’t see him again. And I mention that the last words he ever heard from me on this side of heaven were, “Mommy loves you, sweetheart.”

Is it easy? Nope. But I also cannot begin to tell you all the blessings I get from telling that, over and over again. So let me try to address some issues we have with sharing our hurts, in no particular order.

1. I’m too emotional and I might cry.

Good for you! People like it when you cry. It sounds terrible, but people like authenticity. When they see that you are really touched, that you have really walked the walk, they believe you. You have credibility. They’re willing to listen. And it’s catharctic for them, too!

2. I don’t want to relive it.

I know you don’t. But it gets easier. Sometimes I tell the stories and I cry; sometimes I don’t. But whether or not I do, the audience does. Because the audience needs to hear it. And inevitably there is someone in the audience who has gone through something similar who is really ministered to by us opening up.

3. It helps us minister.

Paul wrote that we are to comfort others with the comfort that we ourselves received. Part of that comfort is telling our story. We don’t tell it to glorify all the ugly stuff that is happened in our lives. We do it to point people to God. We say, “here is what I have been through, and here is what God has done for me.” And it brings something beautiful out of something really ugly in our lives. Without this chance to turn it to good, this terrible thing is just a burden. But when we can turn it around and use it to help others, it becomes a blessing.

I am so humbled to see how my son’s death has led to so many opportunities to talk and pray with people that I would not have had otherwise. Of course it’s hard; but many people’s lives are hard. And I believe that my point in being on this earth is to point people to Jesus, especially in the midst of their hardest pain. To do that, I have to touch their pain, and I can’t touch theirs without touching mine. When I touch mine, they’re willing to open up, too. When I keep mine hidden, they keep theirs clamped up, not only from others, but also from God.

Perhaps you say, but I have so much to talk about; why do I have to mention this? Can’t I leave it out? Yes, you could. But usually it is through our deepest pain that God has touched us most. When we leave that out, we leave out the deepest parts of God’s blessing. And it shows in our testimony. Something sounds hollow.

4. It heals us.

It used to be hard to tell my story. Now I almost relish it. The more I tell it, the more I see what God has done because I have been willing to open up. And each time I do, it’s like He’s smiling at me, and saying, “See? I trusted you with this awful thing, but now it is being used for good.” And it’s as if my identity is no longer as much the grieving mother as it is the comforter. Does that make sense?

5. It points people to God.

And now the final point. Many times people are unwilling to tell their stories because they’re intensely personal. Mine was about grief. Everybody can go through grief. It doesn’t reflect badly on you as a person. No one pictures me in indecent situations. But what if your story is of a different nature? What if it’s about abuse? Or what if it’s about a very lurid lifestyle you used to live?

You need to take that up with God, but let me give you some final thoughts. Everything can be used to point people to God, and when we are willing to be vulnerable, and to say, “me being honest, and telling you how I overcame this big hurt in order to inspire you, is more important to me than my dignity or my reputation”, that is gold. People really respect that, if it is done in the right spirit.

I have heard people give their stories who spend too long telling about all the sin in their lives, or go into too much detail about things that are best left to the imagination. We don’t want to glorify the gross stuff. We just need to tell enough of it that people get the picture, and then point people to the healer. In a secular setting you won’t be able to do that explicitly, but perhaps there it’s even more important, because in a secular setting people lack the path to true healing. So what you can do there is to talk about the things you went through, and then end with something like this: it made me realize I needed to figure out the purpose of my life; it made me realize I couldn’t deal with this on my own; it made me realize I needed spiritual help to forgive.

The funny thing is that the more we’re willing to open up in a secular setting, the more God-stuff we can get away with, because we’ve been honest. It opens doors.

When you do start speaking about your hurts, it will be difficult. You will cry. You will be moody for a time because you have reopened old wounds. But the more you do it, the more those wounds will heal. The more you will see how God can use ugliness for blessing. And the more you can see how far you have already come.

It’s hard to be vulnerable, but remember: it’s not about you. We are on this earth to point people to Jesus. If we can use our deepest pain (in an appropriate way) to do this, it’s an honour. Yes, it hurts. But He has trusted you with it. Now, what will you do with it?

I’ll have another post up soon about what to do when we have a story we haven’t shared with all our loved ones, or how to handle age appropriateness.

I also have a teleseminar coming up in September called How to Craft a Life Changing Talk, which will take you step by step through how to create a talk that tells our story, points people to God, and inspires change. Sign up here to be given more information about that!

The Importance of Telling Your Story

I believe that everyone has a unique story from God to share.

We are all experts on what God has done for us–we may not be Old Testament scholars, or Greek scholars, or End Times scholars, but we have our Ph.D. on what God has done in our own lives.

And if we can’t map that out, it’s time to take a hiatus, in this last bit of summer that remains, and figure it out!

What is the overall message of your life? Where has God taken you, and what has He consistently been showing you? I talked about this in an earlier post, but let’s reiterate: we need to know our central message.

And we need to get comfortable in telling our story. When you know the story of your life, and what God has done, it will naturally flow out of you. However, it often takes a while to get to that point. We’re not always comfortable telling our stories. What should we include? What should we leave out? How long should it be?

I am not saying that everytime you talk you need to be the focus; quite the contrary. But no matter what talk you give, it will be strengthened when you are able to share your heart. When you show how God has met with you on this particular issue, then people see that it is important to you. They see that you have practiced what you preach. And they get a concrete example of how God can work through a problem when someone trusts Him.

In some talks I spend 20 minutes telling my story, especially if I’m giving a retreat and I’ll be speaking a number of times over a weekend. But even if I only have 45 minutes, and that’s all, I’ll tend to devote at least 5-7 minutes to my story. It touches people’s hearts, and it makes them see that I am real. When they realize that you are transparent, genuine, and honest, they are more likely to hear what it is that God has given you to say. So get used to telling your story, in different lengths, to suit your audience and your setting!

I don’t always begin with my story. Often I put it near the end, after I’ve used some humour to introduce a topic, and after I’ve explored what I believe God means by a certain passage. And then I bring it home. Now it just so happens that my story perhaps is more dramatic than some people’s, since I have lost a child. It’s amazing how when I share about my son’s death so many people come up to me afterwards and tell me about their own losses of children. It seems that we are a far bigger sorority of sorrow than I initially thought before I started speaking, and inevitably tears flow on both sides. But that, too, is a healing thing.

Maybe you don’t have a dramatic story, and so you’re not sure if it’s really relevant. But the degree of drama isn’t the important thing; it’s the degree that we wrestle with God and let Him have control. I believe that at various points in our lives we all face a crossroads. God asks us, “Am I enough?” Can you base your life on me, or are you going to try to go your own way? Sometimes that isn’t even a question of salvation; sometimes it’s a question of whether or not we’re going to truly give God total control. And these crossroads don’t come just once. I think over our lives God asks us to keep coming deeper, or as C.S. Lewis put in, “higher up and further in”. The type of tragedy that brought you to the crossroads doesn’t matter; it’s the emotions that go into that crossroads experience that will touch people. When you can be vulnerable and share those, you help take people further on a journey where they’re willing to hear God speak–which, of course, is the purpose of giving a talk in the first place!

I’m in the process of creating some short video clips to help you with launching your speaking ministry, and here’s the first one on Telling Your Story. Enjoy!

* Note: The first module of my e-course, How to Launch Your Speaking Ministry, takes you step by step through a process where you can uncover what the main message is that God has given you over your life, and then helps you work through how to put that in a talk format. Get the whole e-course, or just the first module, right here.

To keep up to date on my speaking teleseminars, enter your email address here!

Handling Scripture in a Talk

Recently I spoke at a retreat where other groups were meeting simultaneously. After I had finished one event, a new group came in to use the same room. I was still taking down my book table, and so I heard the first fifteen minutes of that talk.

It was really more like a seminary lecture, going deep into theology about a particular point. I found myself wondering about my effectiveness afterwards. Do I use the Bible enough? Do I use it in the right spirit?

I do use the Bible, but frequently what I do is read verses and then elaborate on how we can live them out. I do not do a word-by-word study of a particular passage. Quite often I’ll retell the story, adding little historical or humorous details. With the story of Mary and Martha, for instance, I read it, and then I walk listeners through what it must have been like to actually be there, before talking about the main message of that story: what it means to spend our lives doing what is “better”, rather than being worried and upset about many things. But I don’t dissect each verse. I don’t check Greek roots, unless it makes a really interesting point. In general, people can read the passage with me, but then they can close their Bibles because I start walking them through the story, and then I start putting it into our own context.

I started wondering, then, is this the way it is supposed to be done? Perhaps I should be taking a more scholarly approach to the Bible. Do I just find passages in the Bible that support what I’m trying to teach, rather than taking a passage and asking what it is trying to teach me?

These are important questions to wrestle with, but here are the three conclusions that I have come to. I hope they help you:

1. We can’t forsake our own relationship with God. God is always teaching us primarily out of certain parts of the Bible. I find myself drawn to different stories in each year of my life, because He’s teaching me from that story. I’ll often use that as a basis for a talk. The important thing, I believe, is that we keep in serious study of the Word personally, so that we do have a significant personal reservoir of encounters with God to do with specific passages that we can use with others.

2. We can’t forget our main message. Everytime we talk, Jesus must be the centre. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 2:2: “For I resolved to know nothing when I was among them except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” No matter what message we give, the healing, restorative and saving message of the cross needs to be brought into it. And I would add the Resurrection needs to be a part of that, too. Jesus’ resurrection means that He lives today so that He can transform us from the inside out. It is a process that is alive, living and breathing, and taking place inside each of us. So we need to keep coming back to this.

When I was starting to speak, I gave a talk at a retreat where I had left out some of this. I was going over the audio of a message that I totally agreed with, and that I felt led to say. It was all about how we can let Jesus be more real in how we live our lives, and how quite often we try to act the Christian walk without the Power of God. And those things are important.

But in listening to it, I realized that I had never once mentioned anything about obeying God or about sin, or that the cross took these things away. It is not that what I said was wrong; I was speaking to a Christian audience who had already accepted the Lord, and who were dealing with how to live this out. But in listening to it, it felt incomplete because my message was on how to let Christ live inside us without talking about how we must listen to what He says about “obeying His commandments”. In listening to it, you could almost believe that what I was giving was a call to acceptance without repentance, and transformation without realization of the need to be transformed.

Naturally this isn’t what I meant, and I believe that the women there were on the same page. But it still made me distinctly uncomfortable, and since then I have always asked of all my messages: where is the cross? Where is repentance? Where is obedience? Where is transformation? And if it’s not there, I put it in. In this way, I believe, all my talks are grounded in Scripture.

3. We can’t forget our purpose. Our purpose, in speaking, is not to teach. It is to bring people along a journey where they are prepared to hear what God has to say to them. It is to connect with them on a heart level so that they are open to God. It is no good transferring biblical knowledge to people who aren’t willing to put it into practice. We call all know so much about Scripture, and still fail to do anything about it. And sometimes excess knowledge gives us a false confidence about our own security.

I’ve talked at length about this idea of understanding the purpose of speaking, and if you feel like you verge too far towards the “teaching” end of the spectrum, and not enough towards the “speaking” end, may I recommend my download, “How to Launch Your Speaking Ministry“? Listener Elaine Olsen recently called it “the best $10 I ever spent!”. And in it, I go over how we can make sure that our talks are powerful and take people to the place where they are ready to be transformed by God.

In thinking about that, I felt at peace again about my handling of Scripture. Let’s stick to the fundamentals, and share what God is teaching us through the stories and passages that have been speaking the most to us. But don’t make it so intellectual that people are willing to hear and say, “Amen, sister!”, without doing anything about it. A talk that encourages change is much better than a speech which transmits knowledge. And change, after all, is what the world needs.

A Speaker’s Responsibility to the Organizers

When you first start to speak, of course you’re nervous. It’s only natural.

The hard thing to deal with as a speaker, though, is that quite often, the event organizer is more nervous than you are.

Think about it from his or her point of view: all of their volunteer efforts and hours over the past few months have been dedicated to this event. They have hosted committee meetings about it. They have stayed up late creating centerpieces for the tables. They have cajoled and pleaded with others in their churches or organizations to attend and help. They have used their personal capital to get people out, and now they’re worried about one major thing: “What if everyone hates it?”.

So as a speaker, one of your jobs is to reassure the event organizer that you are prepared, that you are confident, that you are rested and relaxed and encouraged by what God has told you and that you are going to share, and that you are excited to be here.

What if you’re not? Get in the mood! This is part of your job! We feel a calling to speak, but we don’t necessarily feel excited by all the trappings of the event, if we’re honest. After all, it’s not our church or group. We don’t know the women. We didn’t sign up to come here to listen to the workshops or to do the crafts or to sample all the baking (though chocolate is nice). We are here to speak.

But everyone else is there for the big picture, and you can play a role in helping everyone feel more at ease and enjoy themselves more by throwing yourself into it.

I have been at events where the speaker stayed away at a distance and only came out to speak. When she was done, she left, often with a retinue of “handlers”. I don’t think this helps to put the organizer at ease. I don’t always go to everything that is planned in a weekend, but quite frequently I’ll take walks with two or three of the participants, or eat meals with them, or stick around afterwards just to chat with people. If it’s just a dinner event, I’ll often tour the room beforehand and say hi to people. They may not even know I’m the speaker at that point; but I make the connection, and then when I speak, they’re surprised and willing to listen.

When event organizers see us throwing ourselves into the event, they’re relieved for two reasons: first, they see us having fun, so they assume that others will similarly have fun. But second, one of their jobs–looking after you–is now taken care of. They see that you’re not going to be a demanding prima donna.

Perhaps you’re not a natural extravert, though. I’m not. I’m really more introverted, though I speak energetically in front of people. Being with a lot of people for hours on end actually leaves me quite exhausted. Quite often I come home and tell my children, “I’m so glad I don’t have to smile for a while now!”. But when I’m at the event, I smile. I chat. I listen. I participate.

Over a weekend event, I’ll often skip a few workshops to go over my notes or have some quiet times, but I do try to be part of the action, because it puts a better spin on the event. Everyone feels more at ease when they see that you think the event is worth attending, and worth throwing yourself into.

Of course this is difficult when you’re nervous and just starting out. The more you reach out to others, though, the less nervous you will be, and the more willing people will be to give you some slack if your nervousness shows a bit when you do speak. You’ve already made friends.

So when you arrive at the event, here are some tips:

• Before you bring in your materials, props, or items for your book table, greet everyone on the committee with a big smile and ask them some questions.
• Set up by yourself. Others may offer to help, and you can accept some offers, but on the whole do it yourself. They have a lot of other things to worry about. Convey the message: I’m prepared, I’m confident, I’m a pro. Don’t worry about me!
• When others start to arrive, circulate a bit and smile. Small talk as much as you can.
• If there are technical difficulties with microphones, or stands, or anything, laugh it off. Speak through it. There’s nothing you can do, anyway, and if you get visibly nervous, you will make the organizer feel worse, and thus delay any possible fix to the problem.
• Be prepared that things will not go as you expect. Be flexible.
• Know that God wanted you to be here, and He has a role for you.
• Talk to people. I have made such great connections just from talking to others. Often they aren’t even speaking connections! I’ve found out about new homeschool curriculum, and new knitting patterns, or even found information on past friends, just by chatting. You never know what you’ll learn!

So put a smile on your face, take a deep breath, and participate! You’ll put everyone more at ease, and you’ll likely have a better time, too!