Finding God in Your Story

Finding God in Your Story

I’ve been fascinated with the power of story since I was a child. When I was young, and we’d sit around the dinner table with friends, I’d wait till the very end, hoping that someone would start story time. My dad is an excellent story-teller. He can hold a table of people suspended in anticipation waiting to hear what happens next. Listening to my Mom and Dad, to my Granny and Paw Paw tell their stories over the course of my childhood gave my life form. Their stories became landmarks helping to guide me through the landscape of my own life-story.

The Christian faith is rooted and founded on a story. The entire backdrop of Christianity is a meta-narrative. In this story we have a beginning, a middle, and end. We have an enemy, a problem, and we even have a beloved hero.

While I am deeply interested in this meta-narrative, the whole of Scripture, I am also interested in the personal narratives that slide into the big over-arching narrative. I’m interested in looking long and hard at how God showed up in people’s lives, and how those people interacted with God. Narrative is messy. It is not formulaic. It is as far from do-these-three-things-and-your-life-will-be-perfect as you can imagine.

Over the last several years, I’ve begun to discover what a gift that is. Turns out, real faith is not formulaic, either. Life does not burst forth when I do three special things to get abundant life. Real life is lived out in the messy and mundane, the ordinary places where we win and we lose, where we cry and we mourn, where people and situations break our hearts in disappointment, and also when beautiful things spring up in unexpected places. God is in all of it. God is over all of it. And despite how it might seem otherwise, God is showing up in the middle of the most ordinary and mundane seasons of all, offering God’s presence, love, and life.

Introduction

The first week will serve as an introduction to the power of story, the importance of paying attention to details, to the silence in the margins, and to the ever-arching presence of the God who shows up time and time again, revealing things about God’s identity, our own identity, and our destiny.

Lesson One

Faith as Pilgrimage

Abraham, Sarah, Hagar
Three people, and one God who called. This God worked, made promises, stayed silent, asked for much, and was not deterred by human decisions. We will take a deeper look at the character of Hagar, how in spite of how Sarah and Abraham treated their Egyptian slave as nothing more than a pawn, God did not.

Lesson Two

Generosity and Poverty

One Widow, a Bit of Oil, and a Famous Prophet.
We will turn our attention to someone recorded in Scripture who was an outsider, a woman on the margins of society, and how God depended on her. We will look at her hospitality, and what it might teach us about opening our own hands in generosity. We will consider some things this story might teach us about God’s generosity.

Lesson Three

Family Origins and Harm

Joseph, his father, Jacob, and some very angry brothers.
Joseph’s narrative arc is long and painful, full of rejection, abuse, false accusations, and a long prison sentence. We will spend two weeks on the story of Joseph. The first week we’ll look at his family, and all the happenings that bring Joseph into the height of his destiny as right hand to the Pharoah.

Note: The story of Tamar and Judah is so significant that I’m going to try and add this as an appendix for anyone interested.

Lesson Four

Forgiveness, Healing, and Reconciliation

Joseph names his sons, saves his family, and opens the doorway for family reconciliation.
I have a sign above my breakfast nook table that says, “Home is where your story begins.” The story of Joseph is long and arduous and layered. How do we forgive our family members who have wounded us? How do we let God heal the hurts that we’ve suffered? If we are open to forgiveness, what does that even look like? Where was God in all the happenings of this story? In this Genesis narrative God is quite silent. What do we do with the deafening silence of God?

Lesson Five

Thirst

The Samaritan Woman.
This story nestled at the beginning of John’s gospel is steeped in layers. Here, we have another story of a woman in the margins. A woman fetching water at the height of the day, most likely to avoid the ones who talk about her behind her back. Jesus talks to her with kindness, deep perception, and with a tender kind of hope. In this lesson, we’ll pause and think about our own thirst, what it is exactly that Jesus is offering this woman, and the invitation he might also be offering us.

Lesson Six

Seeking

Zacchaeus –
The One We Seek is also Seeking Us.
I have been interested in the story of Zacchaeus for years. The very end of the story holds my absolute favorite verse in all of Scripture. “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.” Luke 19:10.

We will end Finding God in Your Story with a look at one of my most favorite encounters in all of Scripture. As many of you know, in the Bible, there’s a lot of seeking. We have the emphatic mandate, “Seek Him while you live.”

We have the nemesis, the antagonist in the narrative, the enemy who is “Seeking whom he may devour.”

We also have a Savior, the One, God incarnate who declares that He came to seek and to save. This is good news to me. We are not the only ones responsible for seeking God. There is One who was sent to seek and to save, to leave all the other sheep and come after little me. That is a wondrous thing to consider, to believe in, to trust in.

What this course entails:

A fifty-page workbook that I wrote with lessons, reading assignments, quotes, and questions for you to use as springboard to think, ponder, and to pray through. The hope is that you’ll download, print out, and put this workbook inside a three ring binder.

Each week I will record a short ten minute video to introduce the topic and to direct you in your studies. I’ll offer you a few thoughts to get you started.

I’ll send two weekly emails. The first will be a thoughtful email setting up the week, something short to accompany the video introduction.

The second email will be instructions and suggestions for your faith practice, something practical that you can do to participate in the course material. This might be to sketch a picture, write a poem, write a lament and share it with someone, take a walk, or maybe to collect some stones and write names on them. My hope and intention for this aspect of the course is to provide you with a weekly activity that connects you physically with the story we’re studying, and with the God of the story. Some of these activities will easily fit into your three-ring binder and I’m hoping they might become significant momentos of your own encounters and on-going conversation with God.

Each week, toward the end of the week, I’ll record a video lecture on the story of the week. I’ll teach on the material, share about my own life story, point out things that I think are important, and hopefully, help you engage the material with the content of your own life.

There will be an online discussion forum available for those who are interested. I will write a couple questions each week and be moderately present to facilitate these written conversations.

More about Tina: I have been interested in story since I was a child, and the way it weaves truth into our lives in subtle but significant ways. When I graduated high school, I moved onto a ship that sailed around the world, for over two years, selling educational literature to developing countries. This was a formative time in my life.

After my time on the ship, I worked and served on staff at a wonderful church where I had the privilege of working with college age young adults. After that I worked in recovery ministry and began my journey as a mother. It was in the middle of working in recovery ministry where I started to write, and began learning the ways of writing fiction, of telling story. I also went to Northwest University where I studied theology and ministry. 

Eventually, I moved to South America and lived in Southern Chile for three years.

Currently, I live on Lake Joy in Carnation Washington, with my husband, John, and my two children, Emma and Lucas. John and I have been married a little over two years. I am currently working on my master’s degree in Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary. I absolutely love it.

Finding God in Your Story would be a good course for you if: 
You want to grow in your faith but you’re skeptical of overly optimistic approaches to Christianity and drawing near to God. You’ve seen the dark side of life and you don’t want a false faith, you want something strong and resilient.

You are curious about where God is working in your own life.

You love story and narrative and are enchanted by the creative ways God shows up in our lives, and you ache to know more, to learn more about that.

You’re tired and weary and need something to encourage you that isn’t dogmatic and heavy.

A clarification: 
While this isn’t a Bible study per se, we will be reading and studying stories in Scripture. Be prepared to read, do homework, write in your journal, think, ponder, meditate, and spend time in prayer.

Details:
Spring Course: May 1 – June 12

Cost: $147.00 per person. I’d be happy to offer discounts for couples who want to take this together, or for small groups who would like to do this course as a small group.

Registration: Sign up through the subscription below and you’ll receive a welcome note from me. From there, I’ll send you an invoice for the cost of the course and the website information we’ll be using to access the course material.