Sometimes you need someone to tell you your story.
By “sometimes” I mean more often than you might think. And most essentially in those seasons when you feel unmoored and aimless. If you lose the plot, then it’s hard to remember your role and to develop your character.
By “someone” I mean someone else. Not you. We humans are famously inept at seeing ourselves, our contexts, and our stories with unbiased clarity. If you’re the only one ever telling you your strory, it’s probably merely the story you want to hear.
“Your story” means the the whole grand narrative. The whole big mixed bag of wins and losses, peaks and valleys, heroes and villains. The unvarnished version. The one that includes your mistakes, your parents’ mistakes and your grandparents’ mistakes. If it’s too highly edited, then it’s fiction rather than reality—and the aim of the spiritual life is to live in Reality.
Somewhere in the telling, as you just sit back and listen to your story as it is retold to you, and if you can receive it as freely as your life came to you in the first place, you will catch glimpses of your true self. And in catching glimpses of your true self, you will also catch glimpses of God.
(See Deuteronomy 32:1-14, 18)