Telling your own story honestly starts with a smaller act than most people expect: saying one true chapter of your life out loud to God, then to one trusted person, then saying it again a week later and noticing what changed. Repeated over time, that becomes a habit. The practice below is built to help you form it.
You can work through this alone with a notebook in two or three sittings, or with a small group across two meetings. You will write and sometimes speak. Sharing out loud is always optional. Nothing here requires you to tell anyone a chapter you are not ready to tell.
Read it: a story Israel was told to say out loud
Turn to Deuteronomy 26:1-11 and read it slowly, aloud if you can. An Israelite farmer brings the first part of the harvest to the place of worship. Before the gift is set down, the worshiper is given words to say before the LORD. It begins, “A Syrian ready to perish was my father, and he went down into Egypt, and sojourned there with a few” (Deuteronomy 26:5). Other translations render the opening as a wandering or perishing Aramean, a reference to the patriarchs, often understood as Jacob. Either way, the story starts small, vulnerable and far from home.
Observe before you apply. In a group, have one person read while everyone else marks the text.
- Who is speaking, and who is listening? Mark every “I,” “my,” “we” and “us.”
- What humbling or painful facts does the speaker include rather than hide? Look closely at verse 6.
- Find the moment the verbs change hands. The people cry out, and then God becomes the one acting: “And when we cried unto the LORD God of our fathers, the LORD heard our voice, and looked on our affliction, and our labour, and our oppression” (Deuteronomy 26:7). Circle what God does in verses 7-9.
- Where does the story end, and what does the speaker do once it is told (verses 10-11)?
Read it for what it is. This is a command given to Israel for one act of worship in the land, and Christians are not bound to recite it at harvest. What it offers is a pattern. A person tells a history that includes low beginnings and real oppression, tells it in the first person, tells it before God and the gathered community, and lets God’s action become the center. Israel’s story was not told for them by Egypt. It was told by them, in their own mouths, without inflating the ancestors or erasing the bondage.
Two questions to discuss before moving on:
- Why might God want his people to name their weakness and oppression in the story they tell at worship, rather than speak only of the harvest in front of them?
- Deuteronomy 26 is a specific command for Israel. What in the passage supports borrowing its shape for a personal practice, and where would that borrowing stretch the text too far?
What Dr. Robinson adds, and where this guide extends it
In a Jude 3 Project conversation with Lisa Fields, Dr. Natasha Sistrunk Robinson, who does leadership development in Christian spiritual formation, describes how her nonprofit, Leadership Links, takes Black girls and young women through the same Bible study more than once over their years in the program. Her reason: “part of our spiritual discipline, we learn this in Exodus, is remembering.” She is candid about what a single pass accomplishes: “I don’t expect them to remember that.” So a six-week study stretches across a nine-month season, because “we’re thinking about mastery.” The learning is also shared. Of her students she says, “So it’s not just the expert in the room. Like they all become teachers.”
Robinson is talking about discipling young people through Scripture and doctrine, not about personal testimony. Applying her point to telling your own life is this guide’s extension, and it is worth saying plainly what carries over and what does not.
What carries over is the power of repetition. An inherited label gets its strength from being repeated: at the dinner table, in a classroom, in your own head, until it sounds like your own voice. A truer account told once will not outlast years of that. It has to be said again and again too.
What differs is the stability of the thing you return to. When you re-study a Bible passage, the text stays fixed. You come back to understand it better. When you re-tell your life, the account itself can drift each time, toward flattery or toward grievance, and you may not notice. Scripture study has a check built in. Self-narration needs one added from outside. That is why the practice below includes a listener and a second telling, and why it is offered to God first.
For discussion: Robinson expects that one pass through a study will not stick. What does that suggest about how long it takes to replace a story others told about you with a truer one?
Name the draft you were handed
Take a sheet of paper and write three sentences that other people have said, or implied, about who you are. They can be compliments or wounds. They might come from a parent, a teacher, a pastor, a culture, or a news story about people who look like you. Use their words as closely as you remember them.
Beside each sentence, write who first said it and whether you have ever tested it. Do not argue with the sentences yet. Notice which ones you now repeat as if they were your own. Some may belong to someone else’s unfinished story. Robinson observes that adults sometimes press their own unresolved hopes onto the young, warning about parents “trying to live their lives through their kids.” A label can be sincere and still not be yours.
Keep this page. You will come back to it.
The practice: tell one chapter, three times
Allow about two weeks. If you are leading a group, do every step yourself before asking anyone else to. Robinson wants adults formed by a study before they teach it, and the same applies here.
- Choose one chapter. Pick a single season, not your whole history: a move, a loss, a school, a church, a time you were misjudged. Choose something real but not your rawest wound. Habits start on manageable ground.
- Write it in four movements. Where I started. What happened, including what others did and what I did. Where I cried out, or failed to. What God did, or what I am still waiting for him to do. That last movement may be unfinished; write it that way if that is the truth. Keep it under a page.
- Tell it to God aloud. Read your page in prayer, then pray Psalm 139:23-24: “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” You are not asking God to approve the version you prefer. You are asking him to search it. Afterward, mark anything that felt false as you said it: an exaggeration, a softened fact, a villain less simple than you wrote.
- Tell a shorter version to one trusted person. Within the week, ask someone safe for five minutes and tell the chapter in about two. Their only job is to repeat back what they heard: no advice, no correction, no story of their own. In a group, work in pairs rather than in front of everyone. Give each person the right to pass, and as leader, pass once yourself so the permission feels real. Agree out loud that what is said in a pair stays there.
- Tell it again a week later. Without looking at your first page, write the chapter again. Then lay the two versions side by side.
If a chapter brings up harm that is still heavy or frightening, you do not need to tell it to a friend or a group to make progress. Bring it to God, and consider bringing it to a trained counselor or pastor. Seeking that help is not a failure of faith. It is part of caring for the life God gave you.
Test the telling
The strongest objection to this whole project is that a self-told story is no more reliable than the one others told. People remember selectively. Wounds bend memory, and so does pride. Trading someone else’s distortion for your own is not progress.
The practice takes that objection seriously in three ways. The prayer of Psalm 139 places your account under God’s searching rather than your own approval. David describes the cost of the alternative: “When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long” (Psalm 32:3). His turn came when he told the whole thing: “I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid” (Psalm 32:5). An honest chapter includes where you were wronged and where you did wrong. The listener supplies a second set of ears. Hearing your words repeated back often exposes emphasis you did not know you had. The second telling exposes drift. What vanished or swelled between versions shows you where your memory is doing work.
These checks have limits, and it is better to know them. A listener hears only what you chose to say and cannot verify it. A friend may share your loyalties or soften things to protect you. Comparing two tellings shows that your story changed, not which version is true. Where facts matter, especially about other people, check them against those who were there or against whatever records exist before treating your account as settled. Robinson speaks of wanting to equip “leaders of character who are truth tellers.” That kind of truthfulness is willing to be corrected.
When someone’s chapter ends in waiting rather than rescue, do not hurry them toward a happy conclusion. The confession in Deuteronomy 26 names years of affliction before it names deliverance. Unfinished chapters are still true chapters. And if the group drifts into giving advice, bring it back to the repeat-back rule.
Questions for this stage:
- Compare your first and second tellings. What dropped out, what grew, and which version would you rather be judged by? What does your answer tell you?
- When you told the chapter to God, what did you want to soften or exaggerate? Whose approval might that impulse have been seeking?
- Where is the line between telling your story honestly and using it to justify yourself? What would tell you that you had crossed it?
Return to the first page
Take out the three sentences you wrote earlier. For each, decide honestly whether it is true, partly true or false. If it is false, write one sentence beside it that you now believe is more accurate, and make sure that sentence could be said out loud before God.
Israel was told to expect the next generation to ask about the Passover: “And it shall come to pass, when your children shall say unto you, What mean ye by this service?” (Exodus 12:26). The answer was a story, told by the people who lived it. Your telling will not be finished in two weeks. Robinson, speaking of years of mentoring without always seeing results, says “sometimes the Lord’s just looking for you to be faithful in that thing, period.” Tell one chapter truthfully. Then tell it again.