Underneath your life, your thoughts, your responsibilities, and your relationships a story is running and shaping everything.
In the movie The Truman Show, Truman Burbank lives in a story he does not perceive. Truman thinks he is just a normal person – living, loving, and experiencing loss. But in actuality, since infancy, he has been the unwitting main character of a reality T.V. show. The individuals around him, including his wife, are all actors with scripted interactions. Slowly, Truman begins to suspect that something is wrong with the world and sets out to discover the truth. Truman realized he had just been going along in life while forces he was unaware of were shaping his story for their own purposes.
The truth about our lives is not that different from Truman’s. We walk along, living each day, not fully perceiving the story we are in. In fact, most of us do not think of our lives as stories but rather as something to be managed or balanced. We operate unaware of the narratives that shape what we see, what we hear, and what we experience. But while Truman in The Truman Show had only one room of writers forcing the narrative, you and I have competing voices seeking to narrate our story.
First, there is the voice of the world around us that tells us we are the author of our destiny. We are encouraged to pick up the pen, write the next chapter, choose our fate, and craft who we will become. We are told life is a meritocracy, and we succeed or fail based on our own efforts. So we learn to work hard to please God, to please others, and to please ourselves.
The very real result of holding the pen and writing our own story is that we are tired. We are frustrated and unsatisfied, but we don’t know why. We can’t seem to create the life we think we are supposed to live. And all the places we fall short are filled with shame and a sense of failure. We come to distrust God, who we believe is holding out on us, and we resent others who get in our way or gain what we think we deserve. That is because the encouragement to pick up the pen and author our own story does not come from the God who created us and loves our souls. It comes from the deceiver who seeks to separate us from the God that is love.
This brings us to the second narrator. This is the one that lies. It is the voice that interprets our circumstances to us as failure, shames us in our humanity, and leverages our weaknesses against us. It is the voice that shuts us down, teaches us to silence our emotions, ignore our souls, and break relationships.
The deceiver’s favorite tactic is to lie to us as children. He interprets our trauma to us as our fault or God’s fault, and offers to protect us instead. But like a mob boss or a loan shark, that protection comes with a high cost. It could be the addiction that takes us captive. It could be the fear and hypervigilance that puts us in an emotional prison. It could be the control and perfectionism that strangles us and all our relationships.
The good news is that there is a third voice in the mix. It is the voice of truth and unconditional love. Hebrews 12:2 says that “Jesus is the author and perfector of our faith.” But what story is Jesus authoring? One that is Good News!
2 Corinthians 3:2-3 says, “You are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read by all men; clearly you are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh, that is, of the heart.” (NKJ)
God intends that your life is a good new story, not written just for your sake as a demonstration of “your best life now!” But written as a letter to the world as a testimony of the difference Christ makes in the life of an ordinary person. It is meant to reveal the handiwork of God and what is possible because of the cross of Christ.
Some may tell you that you need to pick up the pen and author a good story to please God. But scripture indicates you are not the potter, but the clay. You are not the writer but the paper, the heart, on which the letter is written. Which means your life matters. All its twists, turns, losses, and victories are important parts of the story. They are not distractions; they are features. Every part is redeemable, nothing is wasted. Including your God-given personality.
Healing from False Narratives
Since the time of Jesus, Christians have wrestled with the tension between the “old man” and the “new man,” between the false selves/ false identities and finding our true identity in Christ. Identity formation is the work of discipleship (Romans 8:29). But your true self is still someone who looks like you. It is a whole and healed soul, not an obliterated one. I do not believe that after making you, God looked over to Jesus and the Holy Spirit, saying, “Well, we might have missed it on that one. Hopefully, they figure out how to work really hard over their life to overcome all the inadequacies we crafted into them.” God does not say that about you, or about anyone. That would be a false narrative of the deceiver.
Rather, you are perfectly created for the story God wants to tell through your life. You are fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14). You are the masterpiece (Ephesians 2:10) of a kind and loving God who wants to help you do great things with Him (John 14:12). Not because you work hard or fall to the temptation of picking up the pen of your life, but because you trust the Author who is able to do more than you could ever ask or imagine (Ephesians 3:20).
The first step in beginning to heal from false narratives is to come awake to them. We can ask the Holy Spirit to put a watch on our mouth and flag us in our spirit if we say something that is not in alignment with what God says about us, or anyone else. And when we sense the Holy Spirit’s nudge, we need to become curious. Why do we believe that? Whose voice is that in our head and our heart?
We need to be honest with God about what we actually believe, not what we think we are supposed to believe. There are deep, dark thoughts we fight silently in our own minds, stabbing our hearts and wounding our souls. We need to say them out loud, hold them up to the light, and let God examine them with us. Like a child and their parent looking at a scraped-up knee, we need to let God clean the wound and comfort us. Otherwise, it will get infected and act like a poison in our souls.
God, in His wisdom, did not create us so that we can heal our own souls or examine the narratives in our own minds. We are not able to save or sanctify ourselves. We are not able to discover the truth on our own. Rather, the narratives in our heads have to come out to be reviewed, tested, and judged so they can be repented of.
We cannot repent of that which we cannot name. But once something is exposed and named, we are now able to receive repentance for it. Repentance is simply acknowledging that a narrative is not in alignment with God’s and choosing to receive His narrative instead. It is living in one storyline and jumping through the multiverse into God’s storyline. It is tearing down anything that exalts itself against the knowledge of God (the story God is authoring) and renewing our perception of reality.
The hard part is that there are many, many threads of false narratives in the tapestry of our souls. There are false narratives about ourselves, about others, and about God. The deceiver spends a lot of time lying to us. But it is these false narratives (and the false identities they can create) that God wants to redeem and restore. He is patient to work through the different threads with us, healing and integrating our souls. He is excited to lead us into truth and give us a new reality… to give us His reality.
This is where we find freedom, hope, and joy. Just like Truman had to break out the false narrative which trapped him in order to find freedom, the Holy Spirit is relentlessly drawing us towards the truth so we can receive the full freedom purchased on the cross of Christ. It is not about writing the story of our best life, but letting go and embracing the story-of-you that was written from the foundation of the world. It is about putting down the pen and letting the author that loves you and died for you tell His story.
