Book Review: To Be Told

Although I'm not new to counseling, my last stint of life-coaching happened over a decade ago. At one point, I attended individual, marital, and group sessions. I don't miss those days. It was a lot of work. If only all that work remedied the problems. Alas, it didn't. Some of it is rearing its ugly head again.

Still, I'm hopeful. I appreciate my new counselor's willingness to offer book and podcast suggestions. My kind of person! Not to mention, he's trained in EMDR, a new method of dealing with past traumas that trigger PTSD symptoms. So, I jumped onboard for his first suggestion, To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future by Dan B. Allender, PhD.

I appreciated the author's emphasis that God weaves themes into the stories he's written with our lives. Every tragedy and trial will speak something about God through our experience. Like what Alan Noble mentioned in On Getting Out of Bed, our lives are a witness to others. Each witness is important. I like to think of it as a kaleidoscope. We each bear out God's light in a different hue and the composite of all our stories blended together creates a beautiful and brilliant image. Allender encourages readers to write out their life story and share with a community. Even though I consider myself a writer, I balked. I get it though. As I mentioned in my review of The Sand Bucket List, we relate to one another through our individual stories. It is in community that our stories blend and ricochet off one another. Someone else's story can trigger something in one's own story.

I loved the idea of the story feast. How neat to gather with others in a feast celebrating God's goodness! Sharing food. Sharing remembrances. Illustrating how God has been present in our lives.

It blessed me to see he incorporated, in later chapters, sections on prayer and fasting. As if he was saying, "Writing your story is good. Sharing it with others is great. But sharing it with God and allowing Him to fill emptiness is of utmost importance." He writes of the wrestling match of healing prayer. This "takes our stories of heartache and inserts Jesus into the memory to whiten the stain and take away the anguish." Bold stuff! Instead of whitewashing our painful memories, we must wrestle with God's allowance of this into our lives. We must seek what it is He wishes to make of those wounded places.

Allender also talks about being available to others. "Not to be cluttered with oneself is to embrace enough of our story to say to God and to others, 'He is good. And he has written me well' And perhaps even more, being uncluttered calls me to wrestle with those stories that confuse me, the stories I continue to hold at arm's length." Oh, to be uncluttered! To use my story to encourage others toward God's redemption.