You tell your own story faithfully by telling the truth about it, including the parts others left out, and by remembering it the way Scripture teaches God’s people to remember: as a record of what God has done. Reclaiming your story in that way is faithfulness, and vanity has little to do with it. Dr. Natasha Sistrunk Robinson, who does leadership development in Christian spiritual formation, treats truth telling as a mark of character. She treats remembering as a spiritual discipline, one she says we learn in Exodus.
The question deserves precision, because “telling your story” can mean almost anything, from a careful testimony to a personal brand. The cultural claim behind this article is narrower and more serious. When others hold the pen, the story of women and people of color tends to get written in ways that leave them out or misname them. That pattern shapes how a person sees herself long before she ever tries to speak for herself.
What does it look like when others hold the pen?
Robinson gives an example from American history. She points to the great justice movements of the country, naming women’s suffrage, abolition and civil rights, and says “black women have been at the heart and center of those struggles,” even when they were not credited or put forward as the leaders. Then she gets specific: “The Montgomery bus boycott does not happen without black women.”
That is Robinson’s historical judgment, offered without detail in this conversation, and readers who want the evidence behind it should look into the boycott’s organizers for themselves. Her underlying point concerns how a record gets told. Black women were present in that history. The telling assigned the leadership to others while the labor and risk sat elsewhere. Dominant narratives usually work this way. They rarely lie about everything. They decide whose names go in the headline and whose work becomes background.
For a girl growing up inside that telling, the effect is personal. Robinson runs a nonprofit, Leadership Links, that mentors Black girls and young women from sixth grade through twelfth. She cites research, including a study she attributes to the Harvard Business Review, finding that girls begin to lose confidence in their ability to lead around the age her program starts, and that parents begin to lose that confidence in them too. Those findings are hers to stand behind. The pattern she describes is easy to recognize: other people’s expectations get written into a young person’s sense of what she can be, and the young person often accepts the draft.
Her response is representation and record. The girls see Black women leading in many settings, from competence and from conviction. The program takes them into history they would otherwise have received secondhand.
Why is “Christianity is a white man’s religion” a story problem?
The same dynamic shows up in matters of faith, and here it does the most damage. One of the most common challenges Black Christians hear is that their faith was handed to them by the people who enslaved their ancestors. On that telling, being Black and Christian means living inside someone else’s story.
Robinson’s diagnosis is blunt. The people raising that challenge, she says, are the ones who do not know the history. She credits the Jude 3 Project documentary Unspoken with laying out the work African theologians were doing even before the ecumenical councils. She opens her own six-week Bible study for young people with that history before moving to the doctrine of God.
The objection still deserves its full weight. Slaveholders really did preach a Christianity that defended bondage, and many enslaved people first heard the Bible from those who claimed to own them. That history is real and has to be named. The African history Robinson points to answers one specific claim: that Christianity originated as a European faith and reached Africa only through white hands. It does not erase what enslavers did with the faith, and it does not settle whether their version was faithful to Christ. It does show that the story the skeptic received was incomplete. Africa was present in the faith’s early centuries, so a Black believer can claim a history much older than the slave trade.
Telling your own story, then, means refusing a false story and replacing it with a truer one. Inventing a flattering version would only trade one distortion for another.
Isn’t reclaiming your story just vanity?
This is the strongest objection, and Christians feel it sharply. Followers of Jesus are called to humility. A culture of self-display is everywhere. It is fair to ask whether “owning my narrative” is a spiritual-sounding name for wanting attention.
The answer depends on what the story is for. Robinson frames truth telling as a matter of character. She describes a moment marked by disinformation and misinformation, including “people presenting themselves as experts who are not experts,” and says her aim is to equip “leaders of character who are truth tellers.” Her worry is that falsehood fills the gap when truthful people stay silent.
She ties this directly to Christian witness. Reporting what the 10 by 10 initiative found, she says the leading reason people turn from Christ is what they perceive as hypocrisy. Her conclusion is that “you gotta have credible witnesses of the gospel,” and not only inside the local church. A witness tells what she has seen. A church that trains people to let others narrate their lives trains them out of the very thing witness requires.
Scripture gives a clear picture of a story told for the right reason. In the same conversation, Robinson points to the Samaritan woman as an example of how people first come to Jesus through relationships. After her encounter with him, the woman goes back into her town and says, “Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?” (John 4:29). She tells her own story, including the parts Jesus had just named, and the point of it is someone else.
That is the test that separates faithfulness from vanity. Vanity asks how the story makes me look. Testimony asks whether the story is true and where it points. A person can reclaim her history and still fail that test. A person can also tell a painful, exposing story and pass it easily.
What does Exodus teach about remembering?
Robinson makes a small remark that carries a lot of weight. Explaining why her students go through the same study twice over seven years, she calls remembering part of the spiritual discipline that “we learn this in Exodus.”
Exodus is full of commands to remember. After the deliverance from Egypt, Moses tells the people, “Remember this day, in which ye came out from Egypt, out of the house of bondage; for by strength of hand the LORD brought you out from this place” (Exodus 13:3). Later, Israel is warned, “Then beware lest thou forget the LORD, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage” (Deuteronomy 6:12).
Israel’s memory is a story of bondage and of the God who brought them out of it. It is honest about the humiliation and centered on God’s action. Read in its own context, the passage binds Israel’s identity to what God did for them, and forgetting it puts their faithfulness at risk.
Exodus also shows what happens when the people in power do not know the history. The book’s crisis begins with a single line: “Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph” (Exodus 1:8). A ruler without the story recasts a whole people as a threat, and oppression follows. This is narrative, so it describes rather than commands. It is still a fair application to notice how much harm follows when the history goes unknown. The answer to being defined by someone who does not know your history is memory, kept and spoken.
Robinson builds that discipline into practice. This year her nonprofit took girls and young women, along with elders from their community, on a fourteen-day tour following the Underground Railroad from North Carolina to Canada. They visited Harriet Tubman’s home, her grave, the property she bought, the house she built for the elderly, and her church in Canada. Robinson describes the trip as a kind of spiritual sankofa, using the Ghanaian term for going back to retrieve what was lost. She wants the girls knowledgeable about this history, “particularly of black Christian women” who led movements, and she plans for them to teach what they learned to others.
That last detail matters. The young women are being prepared to tell the story as well as receive it. Memory turns into testimony.
How do you tell it without carrying a burden that isn’t yours?
There is a quieter danger in this subject, and Robinson names it. When your story has always been told by others, you can start living as if you must constantly disprove it. She tells Lisa Fields, “You and I don’t come from a community of people that can fail up.” The result, she says, is pressure to perform: “we have to be immaculate and excellent in all the things.” She adds that it is exhausting.
She sees the same pattern in Black women’s place in justice movements. Black women fight for everybody, she says, but “we tend to do that at a detriment to ourselves,” neglecting mental and physical health. So her program aims for “a psychologically safe, loving environment so that they can be knowledgeable, aware, and committed to righteousness and justice because of who Jesus is.” The girls are to do that work while honoring their own human dignity.
The pen is sometimes held much closer to home. Robinson warns about parents who live their lives through their children, saying “that puts a lot of pressure on young people and not even honoring the persons that God created them to be.” She sets that against “whatever your agenda is for their life.” A family can write a script for a child as surely as a culture can, and with more love behind it.
Each of these pressures has the same effect. A person who lives only to correct the record, or to fulfill someone’s agenda, is still letting others set the terms. Telling your story faithfully is freer than that. You tell the truth because it is true and because God acted in it, without having to earn a place in the room through flawless performance. Robinson’s own support network, which she describes as intergenerational and multi-ethnic, made up of men and women, churches, schools and businesses, shows that a truthful story also includes the people of every kind who helped write its good chapters.
Who wrote the first line?
Robinson’s phrase about “the persons that God created them to be” points to the deepest author of a person’s story. Before a culture, an institution or a family writes anything about you, God has already made you. Scripture says, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). The psalmist answers that truth with praise: “I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works” (Psalm 139:14).
That ordering changes what reclaiming a story means. The people who misnamed you were never the first to speak about you, so correcting them does not require you to build a self from nothing. Your history, your community and your wounds are real parts of the story, and you have every reason to tell them accurately. They come after the first line, which was written by the God who made you in his image. Telling your story faithfully means telling all of it in that order, which is also why the honest telling and the humble one turn out to be the same.