Allie Marshall has been a member of Peace Lutheran Church for most of her life alongside her parents, Paul and Karen, and her brother, David. She grew up involved with Sunday school, Bible school, and various musical groups, and during her college years came on staff at Peace to help with summer programming. She has been on multiple high school mission trips and has a passion for youth. She is still actively involved with JuBELLation Ringers. Allie currently works as Communications Assistant for the International Student Ministry Department of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in Madison. She is an InterVarsity alumna from Carthage College, where she graduated in 2011 with degrees in both Religion and Communications. In her free time, she loves running and being outside, playing tennis, reading, writing, painting, and spending time with her family and dogs.
As a writer, or at least someone with a passion for writing, I can appreciate a good book. I love when all of the plot lines come together in the end. I love when the details add up to a surprise ending. I love the character development, the language, and the mystery that comes as you turn page after page. And as a writer, I have always viewed my life from this angle. I see my life as a book that is writing itself day by day…one that has many completed chapters, but many more yet to be written. My life is a story being written by God and revealed to me one page, one line, one word at a time.
Six years ago, I stood at the front of the church at First Presbyterian sharing my testimony of a life-changing moment that I had in Mexico. While my actual testimony was significantly longer, what I shared with the congregation that day was essentially this:
“The first drive through Tijuana was absolutely breathtaking! It is a city amongst the mountains with no natural resources, and therefore blanketed with poverty. It is so heartbreaking, yet beautiful in its humble simplicity. I have never felt a closer and deeper connection with God than I did down in Mexico. In the most deserted, barren place I’ve ever seen, God’s presence was unmistakable. While I was down there, I experienced this sense of ‘rightness’. It was as if I was where God wanted me to be doing just exactly what he wanted me to do.
One of the mornings that we were here, things just seemed to fall into place in my head and in my heart. I started to pray. I was thinking about all of the things that had influenced my being there in Mexico. I was realizing that I had traveled a long way on my faith journey, but I was unsure of where it was headed. All of a sudden, I felt this longing to devote my life to God – this passion to give Him everything that I could. It was no longer just a feeling of excitement, but rather more of a calling. I realized that all of my struggles had led me to exactly where I was.
This experience of feeling such a defined sense of purpose set up a new framework for my life. I began seeing things from the other side. In my younger years at the high school, all I could think was “why me?” and now I had realized that it wasn’t about me at all, but rather about what I could do to help make the world more like God originally intended it to be.
And as I moved forward into the next chapter of my life, I knew that I would face more change than I had ever encountered. There would be new people around me and I would have the opportunity to become anyone that I wanted to be. But I knew then that I only wanted to become myself. God had a purpose for me. And although there would be bumps in the road, I would continually feel this sense of purpose. I was excited to keep traveling along this journey of faith. I couldn’t wait to see what God had in store for my life and who He had in mind for me to meet next. Whatever the future held for me, I knew then that I had to live with purpose because it was not a matter of why I had to go through the struggles that I did, but rather a realization that my struggles had shaped who I was back then.”
This was the first of what I like to think of as “book-end” moments in my life. It marked the start of a significant chapter, taught me lessons that will stay with me forever, and opened up my heart to a whole new world of possibility and uncertainty. It was certainly not the first chapter in the story that has been my life, but it was the beginning of the one with the most significance and meaning, at least so far.
At the time when I gave my testimony, I felt that my future would be easier. I hoped that following in Christ’s footsteps would mean that I wouldn’t have to struggle nearly as much. I envisioned a future full of hope, promise, and happiness.
Now don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of hope, a lot of promise, and a lot of happiness along the way, but there have been a lot of struggles too. I have experienced more pain and heartache in the last six years than I could have ever imagined when I stood at the front of that church so confidently just a few years prior.
I struggled with the normal teenager stuff: rocky friendships, relationships that didn’t go the way I had hoped, conflict with parents, etc. But there was even more going on than that. I experienced significant loss in so many ways. Loss of people, but also loss that had nothing to do with death. It was a very hard time in my life. In fact, even just a few months ago, I recall a phone conversation with a great friend. I asked him “when will this end?...when will the pain go away?...when will bad things stop happening?” and of course, he couldn’t give me an answer, because only God knew those answers…but he comforted me and reassured me that things would get better in time. As we continued talking he asked me about my experiences in Mexico. This conversation with him allowed me to relive that testimony that I had given years back. It gave me a small glimmer of hope and encouraged me that I was on the right path. It reminded me of that wonderful “book-end” moment that I experienced in Tijuana and had me looking forward to the next moment like that…the one that would end this difficult chapter in my life.
As God usually does, He surprised me. No more than a day or two later, that moment came. It was not a day that I would have expected, and it was not in a way that I could have planned for…but it was perfect, because it was on God’s watch…not mine.
I attended a Listening Prayer Workshop at my job…and although I attended hoping to learn a thing or two about prayer, I will admit that I did not have very high hopes for the afternoon. But as the afternoon went on and we spent time listening, learning, and praying, God presented Himself to me through prayer just as He had done in Mexico almost exactly six years ago. Through a series of events, God showed me that He continues to have a plan for my life. He made the path ahead of me clear. It was as if my life were a giant “connect-the-dots” and every struggle in my life had, until that moment, been a singular dot on a piece of paper, but throughout this workshop, God connected the dots and allowed me to see the whole picture. And the picture that it created was beautiful. It no longer felt broken or disjointed or faltering. It no longer felt heavy. I was no longer burdened. The lesson that I had learned six years ago was reconfirmed…I knew that my struggles had all happened for a reason. My heartache had made me stronger. Lost and broken relationships taught me things about myself and about how God works among us. Every little painful thing that I endured had shaped me into the woman that I have become…and throughout this long six-year process of ups and downs, highs and lows, triumphs and trials, God has given me the tools to fulfill the next chapter of His plan for my life.
While I am still in the midst of a cloud of uncertainty about exactly what steps to take next, I feel a definite sense of direction. I have many decisions to make, but know that God is guiding me.
I again know that I am standing at the beginning of the next chapter. As I look out, all I can see are blank pages. Yet, this time, that does not scare me. I have been through some very hard things…and have not only survived them, but have thrived, have grown as a person and grown closer to God because of them. I have had amazing “book-end” moments that have shown me firsthand how God is at work in my life. And I have seen what amazing things are possible when I surrender control over to Him. Yes, as a writer, that can be hard. It is easy to envision the fairy-tale ending. It is easy to dream up what the next chapter might hold. It is easy to want to write my own story. But the truth is that it isn’t up to me to write my own story…it isn’t even up to me to write the next sentence. The only thing I can do is listen to God and give Him the time and space to write the story that He has planned for me. And I know that the next chapters of that story will be even more beautiful, more surprising, and more perfect than anything I could ever write for myself.
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