Week 23 · Lesson 1
Your Testimony and What Comes Next
Week 23 of 23 · Your Testimony and What Comes Next
What is different about you than the day you walked in here?
Be careful with this one. The answer is not supposed to be big.
Twenty three weeks does not fix a life. Anybody who tells you it does is selling something, and you would know it was a lie because you are standing in your same house tonight.
So the honest question is smaller and harder. What is actually different.
Key ConceptYou Are Not Finished, You Are Started
Here is what is true about somebody six months from today who did this all the way.
Still in the same area. Still short on money. Still one bad decision from losing what he has built. Still fighting something he uses. Still working on family that is not fixed.
And also: knows what set him off and can see it coming. Has one person who tells him the truth. Has something on paper with his name on it. Has said something out loud to God that he had never said to anybody.
Nobody is walking out of here fixed. You are walking out with tools and a fight, and that is not a small thing. That is everything you did not have in week one.
Journal Question
What is one thing you can see now that you could not see in week one? One. Small is fine, small is honest.
Teaching PointYour Story Belongs to You
People have been telling your story for you your whole life. A file has a version. A neighborhood has one. Your family has one.
Writing your own is not about making yourself look good. It is about being the one who says what happened and what it means, instead of living inside somebody else’s version.
Plain. What was around, who was there, what was normal to you before you knew it was not normal.
Specific. Not I made bad choices. What happened, who it landed on, what you lost.
Honest, even if it is not a lightning bolt. For most people it is a person, a room, or a quiet day when something finally landed.
Present tense, and this is the part people get wrong. Do not write it like it is finished. Write it like a man in the middle of something, because that is what you are, and that version is the one somebody younger can actually use.
Activity
Write it. Four parts, one page. Nobody is grading it and it does not have to be good writing. Then read it out loud to yourself once, alone.
Teaching PointWhat Happens on Week Twenty Four
Everybody in here knows how this usually goes. A program ends, everybody says something nice, and in three weeks it is like it never happened.
The only thing that keeps that from happening is what is already in place before the last day. Not motivation, which is gone by Thursday.
One person who will still pick up. One place to be every week. One thing you are working toward that has a date on it. And one thing you do every morning that keeps you talking to God instead of just thinking about Him.
If you do not have all four of those right now, this last week is for getting them, not for feeling good about finishing.
Spiritual Takeaway
He sent the man home to tell his own town
The man who had been living in the tombs, who nobody could chain, was sitting there in his right mind after Jesus dealt with him. And when Jesus was getting back in the boat, the man begged to come with Him.
Jesus told him no.
He said go home to your own people and tell them how much the Lord has done for you. His first assignment was the same town that had given up on him, the same people who had chained him and then left him out there.
And it says he went and started telling everybody, and they were all amazed.
He did not have training. He had been out of his mind days earlier. All he had was a before and an after and his own mouth, and that was enough to turn a whole region.
There is another man in John who had been blind, and the religious leaders kept pressing him with questions he could not answer about who Jesus was and how it worked. And he finally said the only thing he had. One thing I know. I was blind, and now I see.
You do not have to be able to answer everything. Nobody can argue with what happened to you.
Revelation says they overcame by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony. Both. What He did, and you saying it out loud.
Tell one person your four parts this month. Not a speech. One person, out loud. And keep the four things in place: somebody who picks up, a place to be, something with a date on it, and a few minutes every morning with God. That is the whole plan, and it is a marathon.
Take it one week at a time.
Defining Narratives · Week 23 Lesson