powerI was sitting across from an absolutely broken man, his heart in his hands, his head hanging in shame as he wept aloud. He told me his story with a cracked voice: how his wife was contemplating leaving him after an interoffice affair. Their family now stood in shambles. His kids hated him for what he had done to their mother over and over again. Trust was shattered. “How can we move forward?”

At that point in time, I did not have a clear answer for him. After all, it was his actions that had broken trust. It was his actions that had left his family a wreck. It was his actions that had caused a Fortune 500 CEO to be absolutely broken in front of me.

Here is a man at the top of his game, and he’s absolutely crushed. He sees no way up. He holds in his hands the fate of an entire corporation and can build or break it with one decision. Yet the one decision he made that mattered the most weighs upon his shoulders. 


This is not a new story. It is one that plays out day after day. It’s also a story I hear too often. It bears on my soul. Oh, how I wish things were different, yet they aren’t. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Man loves woman. Woman loves man. Man sees another woman. Man sleeps with said woman. Everyone is destroyed. Every day the cycle perpetuates itself. 


Yet when you step into a safe place, where there’s no right to privacy because it is a healthy Christian community, and you hear this story told aloud to a group of men who are traveling this same road as you are, you sit more solid, lean in to listen, and feel the huge weight that has been resting on your shoulders for years slowly lift off you.

This is the power of shared stories. 


Shared stories bring freedom. They bring hope. They create an open space for everyone to share where they are, receive encouragement, and then find air to lift their struggling flight. 


There is a passage in Philippians 3 where the author Paul likens the Christian life to running a race to reach the goal. As he writes this, he says we strain to reach that goal.

We strain.

We strain because this life is hard. We strain because that’s all we have sometimes. We strain because life has kicked us down so incredibly hard that it takes every effort to just give a little of ourselves.

Yet Paul also says WE strain. WE. This life is a shared life, and because it is shared, our stories are shared. They bring hope to the hopeless. Light to the darkness. Breath to those struggling to keep their heads above water. 


There is an incredible amount of power in the shared story. As often as I see and hear stories of brokenness, I also see stories of trust being built up again, of relationships being restored, and of families learning to love one another again. The worst moment in your life is not the last moment of your life (Tweet This!). It is merely a sentence in your life’s powerful story.

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The Power of We: A (Shared) Porn Story by XXXchurch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.