Exploring Your Story Through a Timeline
We love helping people explore their life stories! We have two long-time friends visiting us in Madrid in a couple of weeks, and we’ll have the privilege of helping them work through a timeline tool that helps them see their life story on one page.
In his book The Making of a Leader, Bobby Clinton documents the study of over 5,000 historical, biblical, and contemporary leaders to illustrate how their development unfolded. He offers a generalized timeline with six phases to represent the developmental flow of a leader’s life. Clinton gives a helpful timeline framework for leaders to mine their stories to learn more about God and themselves exploring the various phases of life.
Between these major life phases/chapters are what Elizabeth and I call Critical Life Passages, a transition from one primary developmental chapter into a new one. Disorientation, difficulty, and confusion often characterize such a time of transition, including a sense of simply trying to survive. During a Critical Life Passage, people can find God in new ways and discover even more about His good purposes. Much of our coaching focuses on helping workers walk through these challenging periods.
Even with the difficulty of a Critical Life Passage, the good news is that this transition brings hope and courage to face old and new challenges. Walling says that “God does some of His most important formation during the transition times of His followers. He sculpts life purpose and direction during the in-between times of our lives.” He also says,
“A transition is a defined period where one phase or period of an individual’s development ends and another phase or period needs to begin. A transition represents that in-between time. Transitions move a Christ-follower from somewhere to somewhere else… Major transitions bring about needed change, clarify life direction, consolidate learning, deepen values, shift paradigms, and advance one’s influence and/or ministry.”
One of the characteristics of those who run the race of life well and finish it well is that they have developed the ability to see God at work throughout their lives. They form a sovereign perspective, noticing that God has been at work throughout their lives, shaping them for their unique callings and contributions to His kingdom. Using the Timeline will help you explore your story with a sovereign mindset. Loane and Resse say that “coupled with prayerful reflection and the caring feedback of community, paying attention to our stories can provide a sharper picture of God's sovereignty at work among the everyday stuff that makes up our stories. We begin to sense that God creatively shapes and forms and redeems the good, the bad, and the confusing things in our lives.”
If you want to make your own timeline, click here to reach out to us and request the pdf, and after you do it, we’d be glad to help you process the experience.