At the time that my wife and I went through the Story-Formed Life, we had been members of a large church for 4 years. We were heavily involved in serving, and had held a leadership position for 2 of those years. I grew up in the church, had heard more sermons than I could count, and had a minor in Religion from a Christian liberal arts college. But we still felt lost in many ways. We knew something was missing, but were lost in figuring out what it was.
The puzzle pieces all started to come together while going through the Story-Formed Life. I had lots of knowledge, but very little faith. I had a lot of pride in my “sound doctrine,” but an atrophied relationship with Christ. SFL was different from other spiritual practices. I wasn’t being “puffed up with knowledge,” as Paul calls it, but rather was being challenged to dissect my heart and see what was there. As my wife and I went through the 11 weeks, I was humbled as to my pride in doctrine. I realized that I didn’t know as much as I thought, and as to the things I did know, my actions exposed that I had very weak faith in even those areas.
The second major result of being trained through SFL was that my wife and I gained a common vision for the first time in our marriage. My previous Christian training had always focused on one small area at a time. It was like I had received thousands of pieces to the puzzle, but had never been shown the picture on the puzzle box, so I didn’t really understand where everything should go. Through SFL, my wife and I felt like we had, for the first time, a holistic view of God’s story, our place in it, and how to enter into greater relationship with our Creator and Lord.
