Wednesday August 08, 2018

 

“Tell me a fact and I’ll learn. Tell me the truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a STORY and it will live in my heart forever”. – An Indian Proverb

 

The best communicators, speakers, writers, coaches, trainers, teachers, and leaders are good storytellers. It can be argued that the best politicians, Pastors, Priests, and even parents are good storytellers. I’d dare to say that Jesus has to be the best communicator of all times and He too was a storyteller. While information mainly impacts the rational side of our brains, stories impact both the rational and the emotional side of our brains. Whereas data and information inform our intellect, a story captures our emotions, our imagination, and our hearts.

 

Sharing your story with others is a necessary and important step on the road to true and consistent happiness and you have a story to tell. There are people around you that will benefit from hearing how God has helped you to overcome the past hurts, present hang-ups, and the habits that you struggled with and that no matter how hard you tried; you were not able to overcome them. In some areas of our lives God has finished the job while other areas remain a work in progress where there had previously been little to no progress. What might surprise you however, is the amount of people around you that need to hear your story. What might surprise you even more is how God can use your story to begin the healing process in their lives.

 

Choosing to be happy is voluntarily yielding to God to become an instrument to bring His good news to others through our example and words. God wants to use our hurts, hang-ups, and bad habits to help other people. You may not have realized that God is an expert at taking the bad things in our lives and turning them around, and using them to bless others. Consider for a moment the greatest strategy in the history of mankind; God sent His son to earth and we crucified Him. What can be more tragic than that? However, three days later, He took the tragedy of the cross and turned it around and caused it to become the greatest blessing in the history of mankind. In the same manner, God wants to use the story of your hurts, hang-ups, and bad habits to bless others.

 

Someone once said that if you speak of your strengths you will soon run out of material but if you speak of your weaknesses and hardships, you would never run out of material. God never wastes a hurt, hang-up, or bad habit and you shouldn’t either. You have a story to tell, a story about what God has done in you when you chose to surrender to Him, and a story about what He continues to do in your life since surrendering to Him.

 

[God] who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. – 2 Corinthians 1:4 NLT