The Story We Believe Matters

Five days a week, I begin my day in the gym. This has become a sacred space for me as I commune with God and recenter my mind and body on my purpose for being in this world. Two years ago, I developed tendonitis in my shoulder. Over the following 18 months, it seemed to spread through my body like a virus. I developed tendonitis in both elbows and in one of my Achilles tendons. The clincher came when I developed tendonitis in my right hip flexor last fall. That was a new spot for me and my pain levels were barely manageable.

As I came to the end of my usual healing resources, acupuncture came to mind. It felt providential when I found a non-profit acupuncturist making it accessible to my budget. Before my first appointment, I was greeted with the wall plaque below when I walked into the restroom.

As I read, I felt the impact of each word in my body as my eagerness for treatment shifted to a pit in my gut. I was stunned by the intentionality of a woman to design a healing model with the purpose of disrupting the story of the healer who saves people to make room for a better story about self-sufficient humans. 

That story is the one that fractured God’s world and His people in the first place. People seeking to be self-sufficient. Communities seeking to take care of themselves. It resulted in empire rather than shalom—God’s original blueprint for His creation. It’s not often that a quote knocks the wind out of me, but I felt sucker-punched by this one.

I read it repeatedly, wondering about Lisa Rohleder’s story that brought her to the place in her life where it became her purpose to disrupt the story of being vulnerable to needing salvation from someone beyond herself or her healing community. 

Countless people have written stories of the world. When considering the story of a good and beautiful God who rescues His creation out of sheer mercy and grace because of His desire to be with them, I know I couldn’t have come up with that story.

I wouldn’t have written a story of the world in which a Maker bestowed upon each person infinite worth and vocation. I wouldn’t have imagined a narrative in which God was a perfect community of love who created us because He desired to bring us into His community in which love freely flows between the Father, Son, and Spirit. I couldn’t have imagined a story in which God created us to be His image-bearers, reflecting His wise authority into the world and purposed to bring restorative justice to creation. N.T. Wright captures our image-bearing design this way,

It seems to me that God has put humans like an angled mirror in His world so that God can reflect His love and care and stewardship of the world through humans and so that the rest of the world can praise the creator through humans. And the way this comes out in many Biblical passages is to see God’s people as the royal priesthood, the priesthood because they are summing up the praises of creation, and presenting it before God…I see the human vocation, the Christian vocation as being to recover, to recapture that image.

The problem with Lisa Rohleder’s thinking is that there is a problem. We all agree the world is not as it should be. There is too much brokenness to ignore and pretend all is as it was meant to be. People have had many millennia to figure out how to bring justice and restoration to their souls and this world, and it has not happened because outside of a higher power animating us, we can only grow so far, and evil continues to rampage. 

We need a bigger story. We need a story that is power-filled enough to one day bring justice to Ukraine and its people. We need a story that provides the capacity for personal transformation. We need a story of a God who will take up residence within us, giving us the power to transform into people who are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. We need a revolution both within us and outside of us to restore the shalom God intended to pervade us and His world. 

The revolution of Jesus involves the objective of eventually bringing all of human life under the direction of His wisdom, goodness, and power as part of God’s eternal plan for the universe. The revolution of Jesus is one of character, which proceeds by changing people from the inside through an ongoing personal relationship to God in Christ and with one another. It changes their ideas, beliefs, feelings, habits of choice, bodily tendencies, and social relations. From these persons, social structures will naturally be transformed so that ‘justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.’ —Dallas Willard

My body is responding to lying in a recliner with 50 needles protruding from it for which I am so grateful. I am an acupuncture fan. However, if to be fully human is to recapture my image-bearing design, this requires a revolution from the inside out. It requires me placing Christ at the center of my soul. A healing community can only offer me a shadow of the healing my body and this world need and are powerless to make me more human. In my experience, transitioning from positioning myself and my needs at my center to Christ at my center requires a supernatural power outside of myself animating my mind, heart, and body. This is one of the unique mysteries the biblical God offers His followers.

If anyone unites with our confession that Jesus is God’s own Son, then God truly lives in that person and that person lives in God.—1 John 4:15

What is your story of the world?