Held Hostage By My Testimony

I don’t know where I would be if I didn’t write through the most traumatic seasons of my life. Penning through the pain helped me move from self-pity to self-compassion in a way that I’m forever grateful for. 2020, was the year I separated from my husband and felt led to share what God was doing in me through the devastation of my marriage being on the fringe of destruction.

But I have a deep regret.

Despite the boundaries I established while sharing my story, I eventually created a prison of my own testimony.

In a way, I idolized my testimony. Like everything good in life, it can quickly become a god. You see, I had built a collection of words on a testimony that was holding me hostage. I was the woman who fought for her marriage and spoke about reconciliation. I was the woman who encouraged her community to remove the grave clothes. I was the woman who sifted through messages of others with an ache similar to mine, offering hope that the impossible was possible.

I remember scrolling through my DMs and receiving messages from women hurting, laying their burdens into my inbox unaware that my world had been flipped upside down. I wasn’t a woman who was living a very real life riddled with the pain and trauma of another person's actions. I wasn’t a woman whose triggers were considered. I was the spokesperson for a specific type of reconciliation. I was being held hostage to my own story as my reality didn’t match the narrative I had once shared.

Maybe it’s church culture and our obsession with flipping our tragedy to triumph and pain to the purpose that leads us to a place of being held at gunpoint by our testimonies. Maybe it’s the pressure for women (specifically) to package up their trauma into books, courses and Instagram quotes that lead us to believe the “power” the word of our testimony posses comes from us sharing a story we’ve pieced together in an attempt to prove the goodness of God.

I think a lot of people, myself included, assumed my testimony was that God restored my marriage. I was desperate for that to be my testimony. I was terrified at the chance that it could not. And that fear -that expectation (I placed on myself) -kept me throwing water on a house that needed to burn. It had me turning a blind eye to how the man I loved was setting off little fires, telling me there were no flames when I could smell the smoke.

So I’m writing this to set someone free. To officially set me free.

Many of us are familiar with Revelation 12:11, “we overcome by the blood of the lamb and the word of our testimony”. This verse is not just a statement. When we consider the context, the great dragon (or Satan) is cast out of heaven with all of his angels. Revelation 12:10-11 is a response to that. A loud voice proclaims that Satan is the accuser of the brethren. And we overcome his accusations by the blood of the Lamb the word of our testimony. As a storyteller, I’m quick to share a story to illustrate who God is, but we are not bearing witness to stories. We are bearing witness to His character. We are bearing witness to His truth. We are bearing witness to the completed work of Christ's suffering and death.

It’s not merely our stories that silence the voice of the accusers, it’s the character of God in our stories that overcome the lies of the enemy.

And when we realize that, we find freedom from this need to control and manipulate our story. When we realize that our testimonies aren’t always “this is what I asked of God and it was redeemed in the way I had hoped” we find freedom in bearing witness to the peculiar way of the kingdom.

We are called to be storytellers, not spokespeople on redemption. And it’s tempting to think we are, in some fashion, PR for the gospel. We are not. I am not. My story was once I was reconciled with my husband. But in a moment the story changed. In a moment a chapter ended -abrupt yet necessary. And I’ve struggled to offer words to this space. I’ve struggled to answer the “why are you back?” questions as I stroll through the aisle of Trader Joe’s in my hometown. I’ve struggled feeling like a failure because the story I was telling is now so drastically different. I’ve struggled to untangle myself from the lie that the proof of God’s redemption is dependent on things working out the way I shared they had and the way I’d hoped they would.

The good news of the Gospel will always be that the pressure is off. The work of the cross is not made complete by our striving. Nor is it made full by our attempt to control our story and save a burning house God wants to redeem through its ashes.

I’m finding freedom in the truth that the power of my testimony is not in the details -because those things will always change. The power of my testimony is in the presence of the Divine unchanging God.

I always told you all, my sweet community, that my desire was that you would never hear my story and hope for the same storyline instead of the same God. That is still my prayer for you, as you take in pieces of my story. That you would see that God is still good, to me and to you. That the evidence of His hand is really consistent with our vision of what our life would look like with His hand upon it. But it’s still good and it’s always better. And that’s the story I’m here to tell.

And I hope you know that there is power in your story being only written in a journal. There is power in your story being whispered over a cup of cold coffee. There is power in your story being held and repeated back to yourself.

Thank you for being here.