Finding My Story, Finding My Faith
Faith is a difficult concept to explain, especially when you try to explain yours to someone else. How exactly do you define your faith. Explaining your story, however, is a lot easier. What shapes us as people and what shapes our character are the experiences we live through every day, our story. So it is with our faith, we shape it based on the experiences we have with God, religion, and church. So you can see that people who have bad experiences with any of those three aspects will have a weak or non-existent faith, but they still have a story. Now, no matter what your story is, or however original you think it is, someone in history had a very similar story. More importantly, someone in the Bible had a very similar story. Now then, finding their story, and realizing that it is very much your story is a huge step to finding your faith. For example, I was always good about going to church as a kid in Jr. High/ High School, and I was very much into making sure that everyone knew that I believed in God (maybe a little too into it). But when I went to college I did what every "off on their own for the first time" college kid does; I used Sunday morning as make-up sleep time, Sunday night was last minute homework time, and Wednesday night was hang with friends time. But I always knew something wasn't right, life wasn't going the way I thought it would have. Sound familiar? This is when I found the first part of my story which happens to be the story of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32). So I started to try harder on Sunday morning to get up (usually to no avail), but Wednesday night was always spent at church, and it was soon after that decision that I found the second part of my story. It was the story of Abram in Genesis 12, where God called Abram to just up and go to a place He would show him. I found myself hearing this call as well, which brought me to the decision to leave LCU and go somewhere else, which ultimately ended up being SHSU. There are more parts to my story, but I don't want to bore you too much, so I will end with this: While it may not be part of your story yet, it is always a good idea to have a goal in which you want your story to end. In that respect I have chosen the story of Enoch (Gen. 5:21-24).
Knowing your "Bible" story helps you have a better relationship with God. It helps you see where God is in your life, the ways He helps, and the ways He calls you. By knowing your story, you will begin to have better experiences with God, religion, and church, therefore your faith can grow stronger as your relationship with God becomes deeper. So, what's your story?
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