When Our Story Is Too Small

When I was a kid, I was always telling stories. I had a BIG imagination. With my friends or sisters, we’d create these elaborate, imaginary places for us to live. Then we’d create some sort of conflict or drama to work through together. Whether imagining life on a ranch (I loved horses), or as singing and dancing pop stars, we were never bored.

Oh, what childhood looked like before technology.

But the interested thing about our imagination, is that it doesn’t leave us when we become adults. We just seem to use it for different things. Sadly, it’s often the wrong things.

As I grew older, my imagination got me into trouble more than once. It had me creating Cinderella-esk stories about the guys I had crushes on. Then it seemed to accentuate my insecurities to the point where I couldn’t even talk to said guys.

Later, when it came to putting myself out there for adventure or opportunity, my fears seemed to hijack my imagination. Dragging out all the dress-up costumes in my imagination’s toy chest, fear often got the best of me. It put on the scariest combination of masks and clothes it could find, and whispered BOO in my ear. Screaming that these opportunities weren’t for me, or just too risky to even try. More than I would like to admit,

I believed what fear had to say.

No, our imagination doesn’t leave us when we hit puberty. Rather it is the box of crayons that help color both our dreams and anxieties. For better or worse, it is the means through which we tell ourselves the story of our lives. Yet over and over, I am finding that the stories it tells me is much smaller than the ones I believed as a child. Worse, they’re smaller than they’re meant to be.

As a senior in college, I stood looking at the youth room of a church—one that looked like a place I would want to work. Yet the story I was being told inside my heart was that I would never be hired at a church like that. So I went on my way. Yet a little over a year later, a position opened up. I took a chance, applied, and I was hired at that very church.

Then there were the stories that came from outside of me. The ones my fear and imagination latched onto. The ones that told me women shouldn’t and can’t be leaders. The ones that told me a man would never want to marry a woman in my profession. That told me marriage for me would mean submission and following my husband.

So I fought between wanting to be married, and being afraid I wouldn’t be able to be myself. Then God showed me a different way. He brought a strong man into my life who wanted a strong wife. And the story of our marriage became partnership, teamwork, and trust.

When I was nine years old, I thought about becoming a writer. But over the years, I began to believe the story that I didn’t have anything to say. That all the things have already been written in all the books. But here I am writing, and you are reading my words.

All I know is I’ve been telling myself small stories, yet God keeps making my reality bigger.

Where in childhood there is no limit to the stories we tell, in adulthood there seems to be too much restriction. Perhaps experience teaches us caution. Or maybe, our fears grow the more we learn about our world, and reign us in. All I know is I’ve been telling myself small stories, yet God keeps making my reality bigger. So to the best of my ability, I want to stop creating and listening to the small stories I tell within myself. Rather, I want to make room for the big stories—the ones I never believed were possible, and yet the ones my life is meant to tell.