Watch for God’s Big Story

Guest Post by Robert Rasmussen

You won’t know the real story of your life until you live it.

Since you read this blog, you are a strategic thinker. You want your life and ministry to count. You value results. You desire impact.

But your truest impact will not come from any of your plans. Your truest impact is that which God chooses to display in and through you and your family.

When God shifted my career plan from architecture to ministry, I reframed my intended impact to growing churches, happy and effective members, as a result of my preaching.

Eight years later, when God shifted my ministry plan from the pastorate to missions, I recalibrated my impact to be African pastors better equipped for ministry through my training.

What I learned is that these ministries were merely the context in which God would tell His story.

I expect your context is anything from pastoring, planting, marketplace witness, missions, to marriage and parenting. But my suggestion is that God has, or will, craft a more important story in you.

My task has become that of helping people anticipate and watch for their big-God story, and to mine its meaning for survival and gratitude.

I am sensitive to this because God had a big story to tell through my family. And when God tells His story, only He can claim the credit.

Are you discovering your big story yet?

The teaching that best describes this is when Jesus said, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain” (Jn. 12:24).

Your work, family, ministry – these make up the ground into which a seed falls and dies. A situation comes your way and shakes your world in a gargantuan way. It’s like a death – death of a dream, of a ministry, of a loved one. It’s a

• house that burns down,
• start-up that folds,
• soul that goes gray,
• or a mind that teeters out of balance.

Something happens to you, or someone you would pretty near give your life for.

From that dry seed, God begins to do His best work. He unfurls the big story of your life, the one that clarifies your life purpose, and packs your most powerful witness. His redemptive story “produces much grain.”

My backdrop stories had to do with pastoring churches and training African church leaders. But the big story rose out of a death-like experience in my family. Specifically, it came through the struggle for my wife’s survival from leukemia. Was that confounding – especially after a sacrificial 10 years in Kenya? Yes. Did it enlarge my soul and show me more of how God works? Absolutely.

God gave me words to describe the incredible experience of sensing God’s big story unfold. I have written of our fears, our anger, our faith in a small book called God, Get Me Through. I offer it in hopes that others will endure their major seed-dying experiences with faith that even proceeds to
appreciation. That is what has happened to us.

Your truest impact will not come from any of your plans. Your truest impact will come from what God chooses to display in you.