WHAT DOES 
IT ALL MEAN?

In 2014, I fell apart. 
I had followed Jesus for as long as I had memory. I read my Bible. I prayed every day. I went to church, and Sunday School, and Christian school, and Christian college. I led Bible studies, shared my faith, heard the voice of God. I went into ministry. I taught students to wonder at Creation, encouraged them to give their lives to Jesus, and discipled others in multiple capacities. 
But when I crumpled to the floor one day in a state of complete and utter terror, believing that I was dying and unable to grasp reality, I wondered what it all meant. 

I had no way of knowing at the time, but what was one of the scariest days of my life was the beginning of a great awakening, and the start of my journey to what Jesus has promised to all of us: Life to the Full. 
What I thought to be a heart attack was a panic attack. And what I thought was a one time thing became a series of terrifying events that gave birth to panic disorder, agoraphobia, and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I was trapped in my own home for 2 years, some days unable even to move from one room to another without a monumental effort. I searched for answers. The search took me on a path through understanding how the mind creates patterns in order to survive. I learned how our bodies store trauma, and what happens when we bury parts of our story and our emotions attached to specific memories. I discovered that many of my beliefs – about myself, about God, about the world and my place in it – were shaped by my subconscious, and that my subconscious was holding on to lies in order to fight for self-preservation. I talked with medical doctors. I met with counselors and therapists. I spoke to nutritionists, chiropractors, healers, and experts. I gained a comprehensive picture of what it means to be created in the Image, and I learned more about what that Image is to look like as I pursue my passions and my purpose. 

We were made in the Image of God. He is the Master Story Teller. In fact, Jesus is the Word Made Flesh. His life is Story. Understanding of the human genome and the structure of our DNA has actually revealed that there are Hebrew letters written throughout the code of the strands of our DNA. Those letters tell a story. Four of those letters repeat themselves again and again throughout the code:

YHWH

The very name of God. 

He has written His Name on the very fibers of our being, the very essence of who we are. This means that stories matter to God, and that your story is precious to Him. He desires for you to know and to be known. He has revealed Himself to us through the story of the Creation, through the pages of Scripture, by His Son, Jesus, and in the details of your life. 

But we’ve lost touch with this reality. Life has become mostly about surviving, and the things that have happened to us along the years have caused us to withdraw from wonder. They’ve brought us to places of function and reaction, when we were made instead to imagine and to respond. There is, within each of us, a story waiting to be told. We catch glimpses of it, here and there. But often we hide because of the traumas we’ve endured. The pains that we’ve been made to bear. The scars, the wounds, the failures, and the faults. 

Jesus promised us that we would have life to the full. But most of us have lived lives full of doing. Activities, schedules, to-dos, attempts, efforts, busyness. We haven’t been shown what life to the full really is all about. And where would we even begin to look, if we knew were to look at all? 

It’s in the elements of our lives, in all the parts of our story. We need to rediscover the truth about who we are, and what we were created to do. We need to get back to the place where we see whose Image we bear, and how that translates into life to the full.

We do that by learning why our story matters, and by encountering, within the places we’ve hidden, the One who is calling us to discover who we are, and what we were created to create. 

That’s what The Story Maker’s Workshop is all about. It is a journey for you to discover your purpose, to learn the art of the Master who made you a masterpiece, to discover why your desires matter, and to align with the joy of heaven over your identity.