Telling your story

When you tell people stories from your life, does it ever occurr to you the same story may never be told exactly the same? I don't have a specific script for many of the events that happened in my life to date. But when I'm in a casual conversation and i find myself telling someone a life story, it hit me that it's the same story, but i can tell it so many different ways and from so many angles...and I'm just one person!!. It started to make me think of the Gospels...here we have one major event...the most important event in the history of mankind, yet we have four gospel writers who tell the same story from four perspectives. They all give the same information, some more on specific topics...another writer hitting events that one of the others may not have written....but ALL the same story of Jesus' redemption for   mankind. Think about that next time you're telling your story or just chewing on events from your past. Even specific scriptures can hit and enlighten us in different ways at certain points in our life. I once heard it said that scripture is like a perfectly cut diamond...you can look at it from different angles and see different things, all from the same gem. How true that is!

Bless this mess

Own the mess. Sometimes I start telling people some of the stuff from my life. The marriage to Jon that ended with his heroin addiction and  ultimately his triple stint in the slammer, raising kids as a single parent in poverty...people immediately try to sympathize and are empathetic like I am a victim of unintended consequences. Of course, the consequences weren't intended, BUT I sold Jon illegal drugs when I met him, a twenty year old foolish hearted Jen I was...go figure he ended up being a drug addict. Most of the trials and suffering I endured during my life were the result of my own poor decisions. Yes, I could choose to go back to my childhood and blame my parents and cite the brokeness there for my bad judgement as a young adult...but what good does that do me?! Who doesn't have problems growing up??! Lets own our actions that lead to suffering, in one way or another most of us are responsible for tragedy in our lives. If you don't own it...you can't repent of it...you won't change from it. To place yourself in the victim camp is a place of bondage...we're always pointing the finger at another as the cause when in reality we have our own guilt in the equation. Want change, want to move on? Own the mess, repent of it...and live.

Jen