What’s Your Story?

She slid out from a truck of wild men, in the middle of the night, and was dropped like a tied hog in front of the Christian orphanage. Twelve, maybe.

I met her six months later.

And like me at the time, she was mute.  Wouldn’t speak of the travesties, the trials, the abuse of her first decade or more; the things she had seen, and heard…and done…

But we know and knew there was more. A world silencing her with fear, her undone by the lies that kept her tongue tied.

What had they warned her of before throwing her like garbage off this truck with drunken men. Where did she come from?  Whose was she?  Where had she been living before coming here? 

I mean, our minds can barely imagine what she had done….What she had seen.

Still a child, yet, like a flower blossoming into such a specimen of glistening ebony, skin glimmering in the sun; tall, long, a women of sorts, but on hold, frozen on the inside….

I am not sure what drew her to me.  Was it my blonde hair, or that I was a magnet for hard stories, and silent people….robbed by their circumstance like I was as a child…from any voice at all?

Was it my smile that seemed to call to her from far off within the compound of the orphanage walls?  Was it the Jesus-love that sparked this sister-like heart…both drawn and repelled by the details of what she had seen and been through?

I didn’t want to know.  Maybe it was better she couldn’t speak?  Maye I liked flying to Central America, coming in new “Missionary clothes” and just seeing children needy…without getting my heart messy, dirty, not getting low and really feeling like Jesus did….the fullness of a heart-break I so mirrored, but never talked about.

Days passed and I began to look for her. Had she talked?  Has she told her story?

Still, I knew that the longer one stays silent the easier it is to keep treat the world with this sort of; tucked in nodding, pain locked in memories preserving us so we don’t manifest into hysterics; showing some feeling that can’t be simplified, minimized, or brisked away; in a “perfect seeking world” making us into some victim charity case…that’s makes other feel good about themselves.

And isn’t it easier to fit in when you have no story, or you hide it, walking like the Pharisees, posing on the outside, while crumbling within…

Or do secret sins grow roots, implode on you when you lease expect it? Haunt you in your dreams, or chase you in a race of, “just be good enough”?

Aren’t dark secrets toxic; like cancer un-harnessed, silently working their way through every part of your body until they destroy?

I never told my story on that missions trip.  I drove around, did puppets in village after village…but when it came time to do my testimony, my tongue got tied, my perfect lied, fooling me into thinking, “I am just find.  I might not even have a story, anyway.”

And yet, somehow I knew I was robbing from God. Fearing to dig up the roots of my past, living in masks and lies layered with acts of “good Christian works”…while losing my authenticity and being eaten alive, on the inside…that place where no one could see, but me.

The last day came.  She never talked.  No one knew her story…not the other children, not any of the permanent missionaries. And we parted strangers, black and white, countries dividing us…but similar on the inside.

But, they knew.  Someone had heard the truck dumping her, the crazy laughter, the weeping.  As if she was some UPS package, dropped by some driver too busy to inquire at the door.

There she lay until morning, when they found her.  And her story stayed there, stayed locked up, like layers of brown packaging.  Hidden in her silence, kept back by her avoidance, propelled by her torment and wanting to belong.

But friends, we all have a story.  And the enemy of our souls would love to mute us all.  Love to catch our tongues, keep us from living bold, courageous, honest, true.  He would love to rob the healing that comes from speaking who we were before encounter God, keeping the revelation of His work in us, a secret, wrapped in bitterness driven by silence…

Still over and over, the Bible is full of testimonies to the greatness God.  David cheating still a man after God’s own heart, Rahab once a prostitute who became an ancestor of Jesus, Paul who persecuted Christians becoming the spreader of the gospel, Moses who murdered returning to redeem his own people from bondage…

And what if our testimony is our heritage, our story the healing balm to other people difficulties?  What if our power is not in staying strong, but boasting of how only God could have resurrected our destitute souls?

I stood in front of the church a year later. Fearful, but still stumbling out my testimony…breaking the curse of my tongue laced with all those lies.  I thought I would cry, or run, or stall, or forget it and go back to being who I was before sharing the gospel a work in my life…or redemption through my own personal testimony…

But in fact, speaking out the lies and the truth of who I was, was healing and empowering…not just to those listening…but to me.

And what greater feat can we do, than rise up and declare God triumphant in the face of evil, Him reigning still after darkness, Him rising amongst our weak, Him rescuing the helpless?

What testimony have you kept silent that needs releasing?  Will you give it over to Jesus; testify and declare for your own freedom and for others today what God has brought you through?