The following is an excerpt from Mike Wilkerson's "Redemption," a book about helping people find healing and freedom from abuse or addiction. I am only in the introduction, but I am already incredibly challenged and inspired by the gospel-driven truth that I am reading. The following is an excerpt:
Here's what's surprising about making sense of your life in God's story: the story is not about you - it's about Him. He is both the author and the main character, and he has written you into his story to say something about him. Yet, if we are honest, we tend to script our lives with ourselves as the protagonist and God in some supporting (or possibly antagonistic) role.
Often, God is cast as a mere extra. At best, he adds to the background action; at worst, he's overlooked. Some have written God into the story as an absent father who pays no attention to the damage being done to his child. Some have made him out to be a therapist whose job it is to prop up their self-esteem. Some treat God as debtor, holding him responsible for their pain and believing they are owed a free pass for sins of pleasure and escape in trade for their undeserved suffering. Others live a life of despair in a world they believe is controlled by a heartless mastermind, pulling the strings of the universe with no compassion for people afflicted by evil. Some treat God as though he were the source of a better high or a better escape than their drug of choice.
...Rather than trying to write God into our stories, we would be wiser to sit patiently with our Father and let him tell us his. We would surely find ourselves in his story and learn that we are not defined by our hurts or our sins, as we may have believed. As he tells us his story, we must be willing to let go of the stories we've told to make sense of our lies. We must let his story rewrite ours and sweep us up into something much greater than ourselves.
"Redemption" by Mike Wilkerson is available from Amazon.
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