Home > Work > To Be Told: Know Your Story, Shape Your Future
1 " Fasting from any nourishment, activity, involvement or pursuit—for any season—sets the stage for God to appear. Fasting is not a tool to pry wisdom out of God's hands or to force needed insight about a decision. Fasting is not a tool for gaining discipline or developing piety (whatever that might be). Instead, fasting is the bulimic act of ridding ourselves of our fullness to attune our senses to the mysteries that swirl in and around us."—Dan B. Allender, PhD "
― Dan B. Allender , To Be Told: Know Your Story, Shape Your Future
2 " So take seriously the story that God has given you to live. It’s time to read your own life, because your story is the one that could set us all ablaze. "
3 " In those moments of unnaming when we have lost ourselves, we must remember to return to our past redemptions to find God's mark of glory on our abandonment, betrayal, and shame. We wrongly believe that we will be happy if we can escape the past. But without our past we are hollow and plastic beings who have only common names and conventional stories. When we enter into our story at the point we lost our name, we are most likely to hear the whisper of our new name. "
4 " We are what we choose. And we choose whatever our deepest passion compels us to be and to do. To understand the truth of this simple principle, we must examine choice’s power to shape our character. "
5 " We each see ourselves as being a certain kind of person with a specific set of values, beliefs, and dreams. In practice, however, we often are not what we want to be but instead end up choosing what others expect us to be. This is called our ought self. Avoid it. "
6 " Our ideal self is revealed in what we value (passion), how we understand the world (belief), and what we do to reach our ideal (behavior). Our passion, belief, and behavior fit together so intimately that I can say this with confidence: • What we do is what we really value. "
7 " Tragedy always moves our story forward in a way shalom could never accomplish. "
8 " God is not bound by time, nor is our story. We desperately want our situation to be solved. We want resolution. But, God unfolds the plot in His own time. It is in our months or years of waiting that our story comes to maturity. It is over a lifetime of stories that he turns our desire toward Him. "
9 " If we enter our story in heartache, we will hear the whisper of the name that will one day be ours. "
10 " Being free means “being free for the other,” because the other has bound me to him. Only in relationship with the other am I free. DIETRICH BONHOEFFER "
11 " In every story, in every life, there are moments of death that take away our name and rename us as strangers, orphans or widows. At the moment of being unnamed, we are thrown into our story. We lose the name Friend and are given the name Reject. "
12 " The shattering [of shalom] moves us from a place of shalom to a place that is harsh and unrelenting. The shattering brings us a keen awareness that we are alone and in danger. We are on our own. "
13 " Our story will gain momentum and depth only to the degree that we honestly embrace both loss and fear. "
14 " Desire lies at the heart of who God made us to be, who we are at our core. Desire is both our greatest frailty and the mark of our highest beauty. Our desire completes us as we become One with our Lover, and it separates us from Him and brings death as it wars against His will. "
15 " ...you can be assured that the inciting events call for you to sacrifice your comfort and ease in order for your story to move forward. It's easy to ignore such inciting events...It's easy to flee your story. "
16 " But if we honestly name the passionate desires of our heart, and if we risk seeing those desires come to be, the plot of our life story will begin to move with greater intentionality. Yet the only way we can keep walking on that path is to allow our self moments to rest and celebrate the temporary climax of a story in denouement. "
17 " A new story begins the moment an old one ends. But a denouement is a respite that calls us to stop the journey for a brief interlude - to eat, drink, sing, dance and tell our story to others. "
18 " We're in the presence of a good story when the flaw that shatters shalom is also the doorway to redemption... Whether it be our own flaw or the sin of others, God uses the raw material of sin to create the edifice of his redeemed glory.The point cannot be overemphasized: your plight is also your redemption. The Bible assumes that its stories are also our story... We are Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Their stories are a paradigm of our own. Each of us is called, redeemed, and exiled - again and again. "
19 " One of our greatest failures in our busy, driven culture is that we don't celebrate the temporary untying of a complex narrative...What is your style of celebrating an ending? Do you only throw large parties after someone graduates, gets married, or dies? If so, then all the other endings in your story are lost in the wake of another day's busyness. Perhaps one of the reasons you and I don't party well, is that we don't know what to do with the tragedies that linger in our life...Can you imagine receiving an invitation "JOIN ME IN A CELEBRATION OF NO LONGER BELIEVING I'M STUPID"?We don't allow endings to be noted, let alone celebrated. Therefore we never allow denouement to be invigorate the upward movement of a new story. "
20 " So we grow up in a sea of stories told in a way that fits what we want others to know about us. The stories told in most families are a kind of propaganda. The tragedy is that often these stories are simply a form of dis-information...But our families name us without knowing the consequences. So our life is a journey to discover our true name, though; sadly many of us never choose to begin that search. "
