No One Knows When God Is Done With Your Story

​As we roll out of Easter, let's not roll away without taking one big implicit piece of advice that Easter offers us - in fact, I can actually hear God's voice, making it more EXPLICIT in my own life - but I can hear God saying, "stop letting people tell you when I am done with you."

Easter shouts that advice. It shouts that truth.

After watching Jesus murdered, all of his apostle holed up in a house - hiding - just sure that they were next.

They thought it was over.

On Easter Sunday - Mary, Mary and Salome walked to the tomb with spices to put on Jesus' dead body, because they too thought it was over.

In spite of Jesus telling all of them repeatedly that he would rise in three days, they listened to the crowds. The crowds cheering on the murder of Jesus. And they believed the crowds when they said, finally, this whole Jesus thing is over.

You know why they shouldn't have listened to those crowds? Do you know what Easter reminds all of us pretty clearly? It reminds us that NO ONE knows when God is done with a story.

NO.

ONE.

I shouldn't need Easter for that reminder. More times than I can count in my life I've thought, God is surely done with my story.

I've woken up in strange places on the other side of drunken benders and surely felt, God can do nothing more with this story.

Many of those mornings I woke up giving serious consideration to ending my story for God, a favor of sorts, to remove any obligation he might feel toward trying to make something of my less than nothing story.

When you walk out the doors of marriage and into the world of divorce, oh believe me, there are plenty of people who will assure you that God is done with your story. Plenty of people who will walk out of your story. Enough so that you'll start believing it yourself - my story is over.

Pastor Robert Madu says, "when you get to feeling like God is done with your story, walk back to the last place you saw him."

For me, quite honestly, many times that is right here. Right where you are reading me. Because in my writing, someone is going to read my broken story, find hope in the truth that if God is not done with me, that if I can still write about the presence of God in my story, then it's possible he's not done with you either.

My words can become the last place you saw God.

People often want to see your brokenness as the end of your story. God often sees it as the beginning.

If the brutal murder of a man on a cross can become the beginning of a story, what on earth CAN'T be the beginning of a story??

I want to tell you today that NO ONE knows when God is done with your story. So, if anyone wants to suggest your story is done, don't listen to them, go look for the last place you saw God.

And same if YOU start telling yourself God is done with your story.

Don't believe you.

Go to the last place you saw God, and be reminded, he will NEVER be done with your story. Not ever. So please, don't let today be the day you start listening to a story that says otherwise.