Your Life in Three Panels
“…Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it onto completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 1:6)
The exercise was to use crayons and draw your life in three panels. Not an artist, this kind of exercise sends me into a cold sweat, but I attempted to put my life on paper using rudimentary drawings.
We were then supposed to explain our storyboard to someone else at our table. To my surprise, the woman I paired up with used the same image on her first panel, a horse. What were the odds of that? I wondered what the horse represented in her life?
As her story began to unfold, she said she grew up in the country, and horses represented happy things. Her childhood was good and horses did not bring back bad memories. She had a very different start in life than I did.
She probably couldn’t tell by my artwork that my first panel also contained a horse. I explained to her that I grew up being afraid of horses, because my grandmother always asked me, “You’re not riding horses are you?” The reason she quizzed me often about that is because she feared I would suffer the same fate as my father, who died of a heart attack while on a horse, playing polo at age 39.
While it wasn’t the horse’s fault, the horse represented the beginning of a dysfunctional childhood, due to my father’s death two months before I was born.
I realized that both my new friend’s and my life began with a horse, but God wove our lives in very different paths from that starting point.
A peaceful beginning vs. a tragic beginning, yet each of us were trying to make a difference by sharing a testimony about our lives.
God has created a different tapestry for each of us, yet our life experiences are woven together to be used for God’s glory. He wants us to be open and honest about the valleys and the mountaintop encounters because both can encourage others.
As you read through the Bible, it is full of honest accounts about people’s lives, the good, the bad and the ugly. Many had a rough start like I did, but by the grace of God and Jesus’ strength, they stood victorious at the end.
Today, the horse represents victory for me. I live in a neighborhood with streets named after horse racing tracks or horse terminology. And every time I turn into my subdivision, two horse heads stare at me as I turn towards my house.
Coincidence? I don’t think so. It is a daily reminder of how far God has brought me from my start.
What beginning did you have? Where are you now? If you had to draw your life in three panels, what would it look like?