Trusting the Great Story Writer

This episode contains portions from the following programs:

"What's Your Story?"

"In Spite of a Difficult Family Background"

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Dannah Gresh: Picture a tortured author. Maybe she’s hovering over a laptop, trying to decide what’s going to happen next to her main character. Maybe she’s scratching away at a notebook in her lap, trying to overcome a bad case of writer’s block . . . with little success. 

Anyone who’s ever tried to write something knows the inspiration comes in spurts . . . maybe! 

Welcome to Revive Our Hearts Weekend. My name is Dannah Gresh, your host for the next half-hour or so.

I’ve written a few books in my life, and I can tell you from experience: it’s not a smooth process! Fact is, that tortured author was me a few days ago. (And it’ll probably be me tomorrow.) I’ve been working on a Bible study and, well, let’s just say I went so far as to promise myself, “This is the last book I’m ever gonna write!” And then, well, at the tail end of that day, I caught that evasive muse, as they say, and it was magnificent! Guess I’ll live to write another day.

Have you ever thought of God as a story writer? If all of history is really “His Story,” as they say, that makes God the ultimate Author. He’s the best writer ever. And I dare say, unlike human writers, God doesn’t run out of inspiration or make any mistakes.

Here’s how Psalm 139 puts it. Speaking to God, King David says,

Your eyes saw me when I was formless;
all my days were written in your book and planned
before a single one of them began. (v. 16 CSB)

There you go God wrote all your days, all my days, in His book. Wow! If that thought is new to you, I’m inviting you to listen to this program today. I hope you’ll find it to be a comforting concept. 

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth and her husband Robert wrote a book together by the title You Can Trust God to Write Your Story. And for them personally, they see God’s hand even in the way He brought them together, back in 2015. I sure enjoyed talking to them about that. Let’s listen.

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Dannah: Nancy, when this whole love relationship began to unfold, you really were one of my few single friends who loved being single!

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: And I never envisioned marriage as part of God’s story for my life!

Dannah: And so, actually, you had to trust God to enter into this relationship.

Nancy: Let’s just say, there were a few adjustments that needed to be made in my life, which is a good thing, but that can be hard. It was letting go of some things that I had become very comfortable with, familiar with.

I knew how to be single. I didn’t know how to be married. In fact, people would ask me sometimes, “Do you think you’ll ever be married?”

And I would quip half-kiddingly (only half!), “I don’t think so, because then I’d have to live out all the things I’ve been telling married women all these years!” 

Robert Wolgemuth: That is interesting. Just to confirm what you just said. When we got engaged on May 3, 2015, when I asked Nancy if she’d marry me, she said, “Yes, with all my heart!”

I said, “So let’s talk about a wedding.” (I didn’t like, in that moment, but a few days later.)

She said to me, “I’ve never dreamed about a wedding.” 

Dannah: Not even when you were a little girl, when you were a small child?

Nancy: Not that I can remember. 

Robert: Even as a small child she was committed to ministry. Nancy dreamed about teaching. As a small girl she dreamed of reading, teaching.

Dannah: Yes, I believe that!

Robert: So this is, like you’re saying, God’s providence. We talk about the fact that you have two choices, really: One, God is out of control. He’s standing by and saying, “Well, that’s an interesting twist! Hmm, how interesting.” Or two, He really can be trusted, and He’s really writing the story, for good or bad. And so, our choice is to trust Him.

Throughout Scripture there are stories of people raising their fists, people who walked with God and said, “This can’t be happening! I don’t like what You’re doing here!” But at the end of the day they trusted God. And that’s the lesson that we learn from this.

Nancy: The beautiful thing is that God and only God has the power to redeem the broken parts of our stories. There are choices that we make, that people have made, that have affected our lives, and we all know people who have been just so deeply wounded and damaged by a sin committed against them or sinful choices they’ve made.

You think, How could God ever make something beautiful out of this!? But He can turn ashes to beauty! He has the ability to redeem the faults, the failures, the guilt, the sin, the shame, the abuse, the things that have been committed against us.

We’ve all walked with friends and loved ones and experienced it at some level ourselves, that God can make all things beautiful in His time and in His way.

Robert: Yes, the message of the gospel is that God turns a cross into an empty tomb! That isn’t only there; that’s throughout redemptive history. It’s our story, that’s the story of our friends who are listening now, that’s your story, that’s the story of you and your family. It happens over and over again. But a word picture is, from the cross to the empty tomb, God is writing this story.

Dannah: It’s beautiful! You two talk about this so peacefully, almost gratefully. You talk about your pain with some quality that is really unique and hard sometimes for others to understand. But as I read through the pages of your book, I saw something. Nancy, I’ve known you for over a decade, and this book is just full of things I didn’t know about you.

And what I saw is that, through your childhood, your family prepared you for those moments of pain . . . to choose trust.

Nancy: And let me say that pain is painful! It’s never not painful. Suffering hurts! It’s hard! And when we’re in the midst of some unexpected plot twist in our own lives—I’ll just speak for myself—I’m not always peaceful and grateful and calm and collected.

Sometimes I feel frantic or frazzled or frustrated or upset or angry . . . or whatever. But there is something that both of us have been given as a great gift from our parents—which I realize that many of our friends and many of our listeners don’t have, but they can give it to others.

And that is the gift of growing up in a home and in an example of being grounded in the Word of God and really good theology. That just means what you believe about God. Believing the right things about God really does incredibly prepare us to face hardship.

It doesn’t make it easy, but it does say that if your heart is tethered to who God is and to His Word, then you have in that moment like when I got the news about my dad being taken suddenly on the weekend of my twenty-first birthday, that what comes to mind is the default that’s been placed in there through the Scripture. And that is, “God is good, and everything He does is good.”

So you weep, you wail sometimes, you wish it were different. Sometimes you kind of push back and say, “I don’t think so!” It’s not what you would choose, but you realize that if you knew what God knows, it is what you would choose. And one day we will see, we will know, and we will say, “Lord, You did all things well!”

Robert: Yes, you’re so kind, Dannah, in saying that we sound peaceful talking about these things.

I’ve gotten Nancy into baseball in these last years.

Dannah: I’ve noticed that! (laughter)

Robert: This is like looking at the box score the following morning. That’s pretty objective: “Well, this is what happened.” But in the middle of the game, when you hit a pop-up and the bases are loaded, I mean, it’s frustrating in real life!

We cry, we struggle, we question, we wonder, we doubt—all of those things—in the moment. The model there is the Scripture; the book of Psalms is filled with lament. Seventy percent of the psalms that David wrote are laments, like: “Why are You doing this? What are you doing!?”

Nancy: “How long, O Lord?!”

Dannah: And even Jesus said, “Take this cup from me!” Even Jesus lamented in the Garden of Gethsemane and said, “Really, Father is there another plan, is there another way to do this?” So it’s okay to do that.

Nancy: Because He knew that beyond the cross there would be the resurrection—the promise of life! 

Dannah: Yes, He did!

Robert: His Father could be trusted! That’s the message.

Dannah: Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth there, with her husband Robert Wolgemuth. Together they wrote a book called You Can Trust God to Write Your Story. You can receive a copy for a donation of any amount when you give to support Revive Our Hearts. To do that, head to ReviveOurHearts.com/Donate. You’ll be able to select Robert and Nancy’s book after you make your donation. 

Trusting God to write your story might seem harder if you have something painful in that story. For Erin Davis, there are painful things in her past. But she’s learned that the Author still knows what He’s doing. She sat down to talk to Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth about it. 

Here’s Nancy, with Erin Davis.

Nancy: We all have a story; we all have hard parts of those stories. I’ve watched you and your husband walk with grace through some really hard seasons, as we all must. And really, your learning to trust in God to write your story goes back to before you even knew the Lord, because your story had some hard parts about it before you were even in the faith. 

Erin: Yes, from a little girl. We’re all sinful since birth, sinful since the time our mom conceives us, so there’s brokenness for all of us. But my childhood had a nuclear bomb go off in the middle of it, when I was ten. That was when my Father decided to leave our family. I was raised in a family with a believing mom and an unbelieving dad.

I can tell you, young women, when I encourage you to yoke or to marry or to spend your time with someone who has the same values as you, I know . . . because I was in the blast zone of what can happen when that isn’t the case.

So my unbelieving dad made the decision to walk away from us, and you know what? The Lord can bring redemption, the Lord has brought redemption. But I can tell you without a moment of hesitation: that is not God’s plan for a family to be broken in that way.

It’s not God’s plan for a child, a daughter maybe especially, to navigate life without a father. My life was never the same since then. It’s not irredeemable, and the Lord has done such a healing work in my heart and in my home, but it changed everything when my dad walked away!

Nancy: And you were how old when that happened?

Erin: I was ten.

Nancy: So you’re very aware of what’s going on, and the shrapnel affects you (and a lot of other people, too, I’m sure). So then fast-forward. You’re in your teenage years, and you become a believer. Tell us in a nutshell how that happened.

Erin: Sure. My mom was a Christian, so we were raised in and out of church. There was a loss of stability a little bit as a child. We would go to church sometimes and not go to church sometimes. I’d heard the name of Jesus; it wasn’t a foreign concept.

My mom is a praying woman, and I’m sure when all things are revealed, I will see that she prayed prayers that mattered a great deal to me. But I didn’t have a concept of the gospel at all. I didn’t read the Bible for myself. I don’t remember my mom reading the Bible to us. She might have, but we weren’t that kind of home where we kind of gathered and read the Bible.

I do remember in middle school—you know, middle school drama is hard!—and I seemed to always be in the thick of it. I have a pretty tornadic personality, so I think I drew some of that to me. But my earliest memory of opening the Bible for myself was as a sixth-grade girl. I was in the middle in girl drama, and I just felt hopeless!

Nothing my mom said made a difference. I felt abandoned by my friends. In that moment it seemed like a very big deal. I remember lying on my bed and pulling out a Precious Moments Bible that I’d been given at some point—a little girl’s Bible with a pink cover—and opening it. I remember saying to Mom, “Wow! There’s some pretty good stuff in there!”

What I remember is, it gave me hope! And I can look back and say, “That was a spark!” A spark was lit in that moment that the Lord has grown into a bonfire of hunger for His Word! But that was the moment. 

And then my mom remarried, a Christian man. He said, “We’re getting the kids to church.” And so he actually did his research, identified a church in the area that had a thriving youth group and decided our family was going to go to that church.

So we did! I was fifteen. I’m sure I had all kinds of teenage angst. I probably had my arms crossed! (I don’t know.) But the youth pastor in that church walked up to my twin sister and I that first Sunday and said, “We’re leaving tomorrow for a conference called Christ in Youth. Do you want to go?” And we said, “Yes!”

So the next morning we got on a bus with a bunch of kids we’d never met in our lives! We took a seventeen-hour road trip to Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.

Nancy: You knew them by the time we got there!

Erin: Yes, we knew them by the time we got there. The first night there was such a stirring in me. I didn’t understand it. I can look back and still go, “I still didn’t understand the gospel.” I just knew the Lord was doing something. There was no call to action that first night. I didn’t even really know how to respond. But the second night they called people to respond.

I raced down the aisle! I could have stayed in my seat, but it didn’t feel like I could; I just felt compelled! I came to the front of the church. I didn’t have any Christian language. I didn’t know what to say. The pastor asked me what I was there for. I don’t even know what I articulated. 

But that was the moment that I can look back on and say, “That’s when I fell in love with Jesus! That’s when I surrendered my life to Jesus.” It’s the moment, I say, when He “ruined” my life (in the best possible way!) because I had all these plans for my life that had nothing to do with Jesus and the Bible, but that was the moment.

He very quickly gave me an appetite for His Word and, fortunately, I was in a Bible-teaching church and youth group. He’s been so faithful to me!

Nancy: So as you began to grow in your faith, to put down roots into the soil of Scripture, what was the process like for you of coming to see your past, your family issues, in the context of God’s bigger plan for your life?

Erin: Well, I celebrated my twentieth spiritual birthday a few years ago, and it was a marker. I celebrated in all these big ways because I wanted to declare, “Wow! Look what the Lord has done!” I walked twenty miles to celebrate my twentieth spiritual birthday. 

Nancy: I remember that.

Erin: It’s a pretty good picture for the process for me. I’ve said many times, “Man, the Lord could have just given me a USB drive and downloaded it all to me, but He’s chosen not to do that.” He has re-shaped me. Yes, I’m a new creation, but He is a really careful sculptor. He takes His time.

So, yes, over time I have learned to see the implosion of my family. And by the way, those explosions continue. There continues to be deep brokenness in my family. I don’t know that we’re more broken than most—every family has brokenness—but we are broken. So I haven’t arrived, but over time, and I think primarily through the Word of God, I started to see that it was redeemable. It seemed irredeemable for so long. 

I mean, my parents split up. They were not getting back together. It changed me; it changed who I was. It took me from this little girl who was safe and secure to a little girl who . . . the world was no longer steady underneath my feet. And then I became a teenager who was still off-kilter, and even a young woman—a young married woman—who was still off-kilter.

In Jason and my early married years, I was still having regular panic attacks in the middle of the night because of the abandonment of my father . . . and that was fifteen years after that initial leaving! But gradually, over time, I learned that it is redeemable.

There are passages in Scripture that talk about, “Though my father and mother forsake me, You will never forsake me.” (see Ps. 27:10) Those are not figurative to me; those are literal to me. Those make sense to me, and brokenness is the only lens through which I understand the world.

I understand my own brokenness and my father’s brokenness and my family’s brokenness. And what I’m hearing the Lord saying to me through His Word, over and over and over, is not that He’s sorry that it happened (although I think He’s grieved), but that He is working it to my good and that there is a redemptive plan.

The redemptive thread that I see all through Scripture, I see it through my life! And I see it with clouded, sinful eyes, so I can’t wait until I see it all.

Nancy: From His perspective.

Erin: Yes! I just think over time, through His Word and through being in a Bible-teaching church . . . And God has been so faithful to bring me godly mentors. You’re among them. My pastor has pastored my church for thirty-six years. He’s very paternal towards me. He speaks truth to me. There are friends that do the same.

Somewhere along the line the narrative changed from, “This horrible thing that’s happened to me; I’ll never overcome it!” to “This horrible thing has happened to me . . . and God’s already at work to redeem it!” 

Nancy: So when you say it’s redeemable, that doesn’t mean that God’s going to magically or mystically undo what has been done. He didn’t put your nuclear family back together. That was past that, so in what sense is it redeemable?

Erin: Even now, my father and I barely speak. He lives about a mile from me, as the crow flies, but that relationship remains really, really strained—really, really painful for both of us. The door to reconciliation is always open on my part, and I believe he wants to be reconciled, but he’s just a broken man.

And so, redemption doesn’t mean that we moved on from it and we have a happy, functioning relationship. We don’t; we have a dysfunctional relationship. But the Lord’s helped me have a longer view of redemption. Redemption in this situation didn’t happen in a year, it didn’t happen in ten years, it hasn’t happened in twenty years.

Will it happen in thirty or forty years or even in my lifetime? I don’t know. But the way the Lord has brought redemption is, He’s given me a deep hunger for fatherhood. I think that the Lord created the family as a picture of that relationship. It’s supposed to show us who God can be in a good way. But in my case, it makes me need God desperately! I know how much I need God!

I know that He’s my only hope, because I from a little girl had to navigate life without the person who was supposed to be that for me, and so there’s redemption in that. There’s redemption in not depending on myself, which is similar. I’ve operated “with one leg” all this time. I’ve needed Jesus! And everybody needs Jesus, but I know that. 

There’s redemption, I think, in my own family at home. The Lord has given me the most faithful man! (I’ll cry, thinking about him.) He is so faithful. He’s not going to have an affair and abandon me; he’s not going to abandon my sons. And every day I get to watch this redemptive work in the next generation.

The statistics for the children of divorce are devastating. The statistics for what my life should look like are devastating . . . and my life doesn’t look like that! I am twice as likely to have divorced, myself. I’m way more likely than that to have multiple divorces, based on the statistics. My children are likely to have multiple fathers because of that.

I’m likely to have all kinds of addictions because of the brokenness it causes, and God’s redeemed that! I’ve said my “picker outer” is broken. Before I knew Christ, if a guy was a loser I would gravitate towards him. It’s part of the brokenness. I should have married the wrong guy. I didn’t! I married this man who loves Jesus and cares for me!

So, the Lord has covered over a lot of things that should have happened in my life, and He’s done the same thing with my twin sister. He’s done the same thing with my brother. He’s done the same thing with my mom. My mom, who did not want to be divorced, who loved my father faithfully, I’ve seen the ways He’s cared for her and loved her.

So there are all kinds of earthly redemption, but I’m talking about the redemption that is to come. I’m talking about the day when there is no more crying, when I no longer wear the label, “child of divorce,” when there’s no more pain, when those things are reconciled because there’s a new heaven and a new earth and He’s my husband. And so there’s a long game of redemption that I think I ultimately put my hope in.

Dannah: That’s my dear friend Erin Davis, expressing her trust in the sovereign Script Writer, God Himself, even when that story includes some hard things in her background. She was talking with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth.

How about you? Are there some difficult things in your background? Any hopes that feel like they’ve been crushed?

I want to tell you something. Friend, this is not the end. It might feel like it. Whether it’s something that just happened and the pain is fresh and sharp, or whether it’s been a part of your life for decades and the pain is a dull ache that feels like it will never go away; this is not the end.

The car wreck that brought you broken bones and constant headaches is not the end. Being laid off from your job isn’t the end. The fight you had with that significant person in your life . . . there’s more. God isn’t finished with your story yet.

Your depression. The debilitating fear. The panic attacks. They’re not where your story ends—not if you’re God’s child.

Are you feeling hopeless? I want to share hope with you. Are you weak? I want to point you to God’s strength. Are you helpless? The Holy Spirit is your Helper.

Sometimes it feels like—looks like—the end. I know. I’ve been there, and not all that long ago. 

Did you know that feeling of hopelessness and helplessness is also something that many in the Bible felt. They were real people with real emotions, just like you and me.

Think of: 

• Joseph
  He was sold into slavery by his brothers, falsely accused, and imprisoned. Joseph’s situation seemed hopeless. However, it wasn’t the end. God raised him to the position of governor of Egypt, saving many lives during a famine, including his own family.
• Or how about Moses and the Israelites at the Red Sea  
  With Pharaoh’s army behind them and the Red Sea in front, the Israelites appeared trapped. Yet, it wasn’t the end. God miraculously parted the sea, allowing them to escape.
• Think of Hannah (in 1 Samuel chapter 1)
  She was barren, mocked. She felt hopeless in her desire for a child. However, God had more for her. He answered her prayers, and she gave birth to Samuel, a great judge and prophet.
• Over and over in King David’s life 
  He faced situations where his chances seemed slim. He would cry out to God, “How long, O Lord? Have You forgotten me?” But it wasn’t the end. 

I could go on and on. Elijah on Mt. Carmel, the widow of Zarephath, the three Hebrew men in the fiery furnace, their friend Daniel in the lions’ den, Queen Esther. Even Jesus Himself cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken Me?”

In each case, there was more to their story than it seemed, right in the middle of their anguish, there was still hope.

God's children rise up when it looks like—feels like—the end. They tune their ears to God and ask the One who works all things together for good what to do. Then, they obey, because they know it is never the end.

There's just one thing: you can't care what anyone else thinks. Your fear of the Lord needs to be stronger than the fear of man. Remember Esther’s attitude? "If I perish, I perish!" That's what she said. She was going to do what God wanted her to do even if it cost her, her life.

Relax. It's probably not going to cost you your life to rise back up out of this pain. But there may be something that has to be risked: your dreams, your reputation, your future career, your friends, that relationship, your social life.

Look to God, dear friend. Do what He says. It's not the end. He’s writing your story. He’s actually writing all of history, and it ends well for His children.

So it’s not the end. Rise up. Look with eyes that don't see destruction, but a feast in the future. Endure the cross you’re suffering right now for the joy set before you. That’s what Jesus did. He knew it wasn’t the end.

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So, can you really trust God to write your story? The answer of Scripture is, "Yes! A thousand times yes!" Will there be surprises, twists, and turns? Absolutely. But does He know what He’s doing? He does. I hope you find comfort in that fact.

I just mentioned Esther. She risked her life and was used by God to avert a genocide. Do you think there might be some lessons to learn from Queen Esther?

I do.

Here in March, as a thank-you gift for your donation of any amount, we’ll send you a Bible study workbook on Esther. It’s one from our “Women of the Bible” series of Bible studies. 

Or, if you’d prefer to receive the book I mentioned earlier by Robert and Nancy Wolgemuth, You Can Trust God to Write Your Story, you can select that one. So you can make a donation to Revive Our Hearts, and then you have a choice: receive the study Esther: Trusting God’s Plan or the book by Robert and Nancy, You Can Trust God to Write Your Story.

To give, just head to this web address: ReviveOurHearts.com/Donate. And if you’d like to hear the full episodes we pulled clips from for this program, go to ReviveOurHearts.com/Weekend, and select this episode: “Trusting the Great Story Writer.”

Speaking of Esther, Nancy will start a series on that amazing young woman from the Old Testament. That’s starting this week on our daily program and podcast, Revive Our Hearts.

Next weekend, we’ll look more at trusting God—this time trusting Him when things go from bad to worse. I hope you’ll join us for that. 

Thanks for listening today. I’m Dannah Gresh. We’ll see you next time for Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.