To Be Told

To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future

By Dan B. Allender

I finished this book on February 18, 2017. Talk about convicting. One thought that's consumed me for the past year or longer is the idea of what story do I really want to tell. When I share the story of my life with others, what is my story going to be? What parts am I going to include? What things would I like to leave out? But what's the point of a story if you aren't going to tell the whole story? And how revealing is a story if it's not raw and overwhelming with authenticity and truth? It's been suggested many times to me that I should write a book, and share my story, my testimony, and my journey with others. I've struggled wondering if I really had a story to tell, and why would anyone care to listen to it. But in recently sharing a video testimony with my church, and now with reading this book, and with careful thought and prayer, I really do believe it's been written in my heart to share my story. It has nothing to do with drawing attention to myself — quite the opposite in fact — it has everything to do with sharing our stories with others in hopes of revealing God.

"Which choice allows you to live your life most consistently with how God has been writing your life story."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"You can't tell your story until you know it. And you can't truly know it without owning your part in writing it. And you won't write a really glorious story until you've wrestled with the Author who has already written long chapters of your life, many of them not to your liking."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"You are a story. You are not merely the possessor and teller of a number of stories; you are a well-written, intentional story that is authored by the greatest Writer of all time, and even before time and after time."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"The ending of my story is how I lived my life toward an aim, a finish that is worth both dying for and living for. If I live my life for me alone, then my story is as dull as my self-absorption, even if I have survived untold adventures. But if I live my life for Someone more important than myself and I have sacrificed, nobly risked, been humbled, learned, grown, and given, then my life is headed toward a glorious ending."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"Often when our world rips apart, we are able to see more easily what our story is and to hear more clearly what our name is."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"We love stories as long as they happen to someone else."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"Our story will gain momentum and depth only to the degree that we honestly embrace both loss and fear."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"God is not bound by time, nor is our story. We desperately want our situation solved. We want resolution. But God unfolds the plot in his own time. It is our months or years of waiting that our story comes to maturity. It is over a lifetime of stories that he turns our desire toward him."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"If we honestly name the passionate desires of our heart, and if we risk seeing those desires come to be, the plot of our life story will begin to move with greater intentionality."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"Because we live in a fallen world, we will encounter abandonment, betrayal, and shame. These experiences are inevitable, but they also provide the context necessary for coming to grips with how we will live our lives. In the midst of affliction, we become either our truest or our most false self."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"It is our responsibility to know our story so we can live it out more intentionally and boldly for the Great Story, the gospel."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"Most of what we do day to day seems mundane, isolated, and lost in the sea of sameness. But underlying everything we choose is desire. It is desire that shapes when and to what we say yes."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"Our heart is more than our mind, deeper than our will, and truer than our emotions. It is the sum of our being."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"The path to becoming what we dream as ideal involves a series of risks, compromises, fights, and failures. The deepest passion fuels our ideal. Passion is what makes us feel most alive."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"We always choose what we value most, even when our choice does us harm. We won't change our behavior until we first recognize what we value most deeply and then honestly face how our passions reinforce what we really believe. We can change our beliefs, but doing so won't alter our behavior until our beliefs transform our values. We can change what we do, but the changes won't last if our values and convictions are not transformed."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"What moves me should be the passions that God has written into my story, even if I don't fully understand what they are or why they exist. I must find them so I can become real."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"Tragedy awakens passion in a way that times of calm and blessing, pleasure and joy, cannot."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"Friendships that go bad sicken the heart."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"Relationships seem permanent, but they are no more solid than the ground that can be shaken by an earthquake."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"Sex without the prior expression of loyalty and commitment loses all meaning because it lacks memory of the past or promise of a future."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"If we face our tragedies with an open heart, we will become more tender toward ourselves and others. Tenderness gives us the freedom to speak yes to those who ache and who need the kind touch of our care. Tragedy prepares us to become who we are meant to be."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"Location, timing, nationality, gender, and age don't limit the creativity or humor of God."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"I am called by God not for a mere season or reason but for an eternity to reveal his glory."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"God births dreams in us and then allows the desire to move us; it is in the pursuit of our dreams that we encounter tragedy and meet the deeper desires that only loss and heartache can reveal."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"We can make our plans, but the Lord determines our steps."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"Our dreams must reveal the unimaginable — that we will reflect the character and glory of God into the lives of other people."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"It matters what we do, but what we do matters little compared to how we do it."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"Dreams can quickly become fantasies if we refuse to risk and bleed for our future."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"Reality is where God shows up. Reality may be painful, but if we want to meet God we have to go there."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"I will be the only person who stands before the face of God to take account for my life. Many have influenced me — both for good and ill — but I will not be able to bring a small group before the throne of God and say, “They are the ones who made me this way.” We live as one, but it is always a one formed by many."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"It's a privilege to be disciplined by God."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"Prayer tills the soil of the soul and unearths the clods of stories that lie beneath the surface. Prayer exposes and opens our heart. It takes us into a dialogue with God that is often disconnecting. Prayer also becomes the context for receiving from God his presence. It is a conversation that brings us face to face with how he authors us and calls us to write our story. Prayer, in straight talk, is surrender to God's authorship."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"Jesus doesn't take away anguish and anger; he transforms heartache to passion and anger to righteous defiance. Instead of shelving these unsavory emotions to get them out of sight, Jesus transforms them."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"Prayer sensitizes, arouses, and moves us. The result is more tears and more desire. As we pray with this kind of honesty, we walk the terrain of heartache and shame with greater freedom."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"Evil malignantly grows from the freedom we possess to love or not love. Love would be meaningless if we didn't also have the option to not love."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"There have been times when I've opened my eyes abruptly as a I prayed without words, open and present before God's grace, because I felt a goodness surrounding me that sent a chill of joy throughout my body. The light in my body was palpable. Psychological state? Synaptic release of serotonin? Presence of God? Why must I choose from among these? Could it not be all three and more? All I know is that my body received the pulse of love that is consonant with sitting in the warm lap of a father, feeling the warm embrace of a brother, and melting into the warm caress of a lover."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"We must nourish the truest desires of our heart and then risk the bold act required to give our dreams the ground to grow."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"Whatever you do in this life for God, don't forget that you are undeserving of such luxurious grace."
― Dr. Ray Dillard
"In truth we are as indebted to those who hated us and did us harm as we are to those who have gifted us with a faint reminder of God."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"As we live our story, we are to give away our talents, time, and wealth to indebt others not to ourselves but to the God who writes great stories."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"Risk is inevitable; safety is impossible. The safer you wish to be, the more likely it is that you will die like a deer in the blinding headlights of the approaching God."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"All our stories are meant to be available for the purpose of revealing God and connecting us to one another."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
"Every story given to us and every story told to another is a precious gift that has the potential to seed us with God."
― Dan B. Allender - To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future

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