Where did your story begin?
Perhaps it was in a home wrought with chaos and conflict or in a family soon to be devastated by divorce. Maybe it begins amid a cycle of job-loss, mounting bills, frequent address changes, or an environment marked by addiction and abuse.
The question is: If your childhood was marked by brokenness and turmoil, what did this teach you about yourself?
Whether for good or ill, our sense of self is profoundly shaped by our formative years. Our first interactions with family and early experiences of home—these ingredients combine to create our first conclusions about who we are and what we’re worth. The problem is, not only are these first conclusions often untrue, but they are also far more persistent than we’d prefer.
But what if they don’t need to be? What if brokenness could mark your childhood, but not your continued sense of identity? Sure, sometimes it seems we’re simply wired to take cues from our beginnings, but what if our beginning goes back far beyond our formative years?
Where You Really Began
Yes, Christian, your story did have a beginning. And yes, God means for you to derive your sense of self from it. But your beginning—your real beginning—took place long before your birth and long before family brokenness. Long before the stars ever shone in the sky.
When your story began in the eternal purpose of God, it was before the world began. He chose you, in him, before the foundation of the world (Eph. 1:4).
To truly understand your story, then, you must start with God long before you were born or the world was made. Begin with God: Holy, happy, and wonderful—before He had created the day or night and all was whole. To see ourselves rightly, we must start before the foundation of the world.
God brought you into His mind according to His will and delight. It was in a context of perfect, unremitted peace.
As God thought of you, He did so according to His peerless wisdom and boundless understanding. He did not think of you because of confusion or an argument, but from a life-giving love that is unmatched by any. In this setting of supreme and unblemished goodness, God established His plan for you. You would be:
- A soul He would send His Son to save.
- A child He would adopt and call His own.
- An image bearer He would conform into the image of His glorious Son (Rom. 8:29).
He would write you, His beloved character, into His Great Story—the one that would beget all others. An epic of justice, sacrifice, victory, and delight. A tale in which Jesus shines as the only true hero, and His Church reflects His glory. This, Christian, is the true first page of your story—a story not ultimately of loss, disappointment, and confusion, but of promise, assurance, and everlasting victory.
We must see ourselves not mainly in terms of broken beginnings, but God’s persistent involvement and perfect love.
God’s Purpose Through the Brokenness
Why is it that you, today, believe in Jesus? Is it because God just so happened to look down one day, notice your life spinning out of control, and enter in? Was there a point in which God was a newcomer to your life—reacting to the mess of some new situation? Or, in truth, had He been present all along, working out the details according to His grand design?
Paul, in 2 Timothy, says the saved are saved, “Because of [God’s] own purpose and grace”—a purpose He decreed “before the ages began” (2 Tim. 1:9).
Although we must face the painful realities of a fallen and sinful world, the fact that God, “works all things according to the counsel of His will” is a more ultimate reality that should cause us to hope (Eph. 1:11). The omniscient mind that thought up the universe is behind every detail of life—even the painful ones—for your good (Rom. 8:28).
God’s involvement in your life has never skipped a beat.
God’s Perpetual Love
Not only have His purposes never skipped a beat, but neither has His pure and perfect love. Before time began, God loved you (Eph. 1:4–5). Two thousand years ago, He proved this love for you at the cross (Rom. 5:8). At the time of your conversion, God poured out His love upon you by making you alive in Christ (Eph. 2:4–5).
God’s love has never changed, and He has always remained close—even when His love seems difficult to feel. God set His love upon you before He called light into being and planets into orbit, and His heart has continued to beat with that same love for you ever since.
God’s Declaration Over It All
Long ago, God wrote your name—and it wasn’t on a scrap piece of paper or on a list of to-dos. He inscribed your name into His book of life so deep and bold that no eraser could ever touch it, nor any scheme of Satan pluck you from His hand (Rev. 13:8). God’s story of you is older than the universe. It was He who spoke the first word over you.
No, you don’t ultimately come from brokenness. You come from the perfect, consistent, never-failing God.
