“Your testimony isn’t dramatic enough.”
I’ll never forget being told that as a 17-year-old on a mission trip. Our team had written and rehearsed our testimonies before the trip, but when we got there and met up with other teams from around the country and the organization, mine apparently didn’t make the cut.
Looking back, I guess most of our testimonies probably didn’t measure up. In reality, the majority of us were church kids with relatively uneventful backstories, and more still, we were all teenagers . . . we hadn’t exactly lived a whole lot of life.
But I got the point: they were looking for miraculous transformation stories that brought home the point that Jesus can change anything. One day, you’re living one way, and the next, your life is radically transformed and totally different.
We all love those stories. I get it.
And, if I’m being honest, I really wish that were my story. I like to think about looking someone in the face or writing here and saying, “I experienced anxiety and depression, but I’ve been set free and it’s gone forever.”
Instead, my story goes more like this . . . “I grew up in the church. I had a lovely childhood. I gave my life to Jesus when I was nine years old. Still, I’ve experienced anxiety and depression for almost 30 years. Almost on the daily, my mind is plagued by all manner of chaotic, intrusive, and unwanted thoughts. Some periods of my life have been extremely dark, and I’ve experienced suicidal ideation more than once.
BUT GOD HAS SHOWN UP EVERY SINGLE TIME. God has kept me and continues to keep me when I can’t keep myself.”
So far, that’s my testimony. Maybe it’s not powerfully convincing, maybe it’s not the overnight miracle we all want, but it’s the story of my path.
Immediate miracles are incredible and very real. I can’t deny that. But what about when our miracle looks like bread from heaven every day for 40 years in the wilderness (Exodus 16)? What about when our miracle looks like showing up every morning to gather and receive that bread from heaven rather than being angry that God hasn’t shown up in the big way (the one time and it’s over way?) we’d hoped He would have?
I think that when we only look for the momentous, single-time, swift miracles, we rob God of the honor He’s due, for being the faithful God who shows up every single day in the wilderness and meets all of our needs (even when we complain).
I think saying that God is a God of miracles while placing Him in a box that defines miracles as only astonishing one-time transformations also diminishes our ability to see God’s movement in our lives and the world around us. The stories He is writing are not often black-and-white, yet such stories are no less valuable because the journey seems a lot more like faithfulness and obedience and trust than a miracle.
Recently, I was talking to a woman who is very dear to me, and she said, “When I read your work, I always think that people are being healed little by little by your words.” That idea of little-by-little healing struck me. It’s not that I show up once to work or write, and call it good. My obedience to walk in the path God has called me (whether that is teaching or writing or being a mom or any number of other things) requires daily and long-haul obedience, and He can use that to work out the little-by-little healing of people’s souls.
The whole idea got me to thinking. (That’s what we writers do best: think and then think some more and then overthink everything. Yay.) I have experienced this very thing myself, quite tangibly in the last year.
For one, my journey picked up with a visit to the chiropractor last February. And although I had desperately hoped it would be a one-time adjustment, reality hit hard. My body needed a lot of attention. I would even have been okay with going for three months and having success. The process, rather, has been a slow, every-three-weeks plus every-day-at-home kind of healing with plenty of setbacks in between.
Not long after this visit to the chiropractor when the need for wide sweeping healing became evidently apparent, we set foot in church for the first time in five years. I was bitter and bruised, angry and cynical, full of doubts and surrounded in emotional armor. I can still vividly recall walking in the door with a deer-in-the-headlights look and totally unable to breathe and being rescued by a complete stranger who helped us figure out how to check the kids into their classrooms.
This stranger-turned-friend? I have never met anyone like her. Every interaction with her makes me feel like the most important, valued, and loved person in the entire world, and that says absolutely nothing about me and everything about the way this woman loves people. God has given her an incredible heart for people, and I know I’m not the only person who has been touched by the level of love that pours out of her.
But I was thinking the other day that I didn’t become a new person overnight simply by meeting her. Instead, over the course of the last year, every interaction I’ve had with her (whether through a text message, a hug in the church lobby, or sitting across from her over coffee) has brought healing to my soul. (Honestly, it’s a healing I didn’t go looking for and haven’t asked for, a healing that has surprised me and undone me.) It is this woman’s day-in and day-out faithfulness to the gifts God has given her and the call He has placed on her life, not a single transformational moment, that God has used to touch deep and painful parts of my heart.
Couldn’t this, just maybe, be what actually makes up our testimonies? Meeting Jesus is a monumental, life-changing thing, but it is really just the start. It is then, the meeting with Him day after day that transforms us and restores our souls. What if we began to see all the places and spaces God shows up in our lives, all of the (seemingly little) ways He meets us and loves us and heals us day after day, year after year? (And the ways He uses us to do the same in the lives of other people?) And then tell those stories?
I do think that as we follow Jesus, we will get to experience and receive one-time miracles that are powerfully transformational. But I pray that we’d also have the eyes to see all of the little miracles we are given each day, all of the daily gifts of healing and wholeness God delivers straight from heaven morning by morning. If we have decided to follow Jesus, our testimonies will never only be a single moment. They will be made up of a lifetime of showing up, more importantly a lifetime of seeing God show up, a lifetime of choosing faithfulness and receiving God’s faithfulness in spite of all of our lack. And maybe this doesn’t seem dramatic or powerful or transformative enough, but it’s still a testimony and one worth sharing.
Cati Grape 