Discovering and developing a story of your life lived with God is a powerful experience and can help you share your faith and experience with others. Many people get anxious about evangelism. But when you have an authentic and well-developed story to share, it can take the pressure off and allow you to be more authentically yourself. Story Box will take you through a prayerful and intentional process that will develop your story's FACETS.

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FACETS stands for Feeling, Affect, Change, Experience, Truth, and Scripture. (A facet is one "face" of what will become your story box).  You can watch this video message to explain how the FACETS of Story Box work, but here is a thumb-nail sketch:

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Impactful stories of a life lived with God are often identified by a strong and memorable emotion. The feelings associated with your testimony are important because this is where a listener will connect, feel empathy, and be inspired to connect your story to their own life. Our hearts record our emotions so that we will learn from our experiences. The FACETS tool begins with remembering a time of profound emotion or feeling and recording those emotions as the link back to your experience of God's work in your life. 

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Once you have identified a feeling associated with a story of God working in your life, you are ready for the next part of FACETS: the Affect. How did the experience associated with strong emotions touch, challenge, disturb, or move you?  Once you record the Affect this had on you, a true story of testimony of a life lived with God will result in a Change. This change should be internal, a way that you changed as a result of an encounter with God's grace, love, and power. But this change can also be reflected in external changes in life circumstance, where your story "turns a corner". A story that is worthy of your Story Box, will communicate a profound change in this way. 

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God wants to enact lasting changes in our lives that represent a new trajectory. The next step in the Story Box process and in FACETS is Experience. Record how you have experienced that change over time. What new parts of life have opened up? Where have you seen further progress and development in your walk with God? How has that change translated into a truly new way of being in the world? How has it impacted your faith? 

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This leads us to the next important step, which is to reveal what new thing you have learned with God and about God? What new aspect of His character and nature has he revealed? This is the T, for Truth or Teaching. This is what you are looking now to pass on and to teach others through your experience. 

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The final step is to record a passage of Scripture that supports the truth you are communicating. As we go through events and experiences in our life lived with God, the Bible is our constant companion, providing comfort, reassurances, guidance, and healing. At the end of such an experience, there are often one or two main passages from God's Word that supports what has happened in your life. Especially if you have something to teach others about what you have learned about God's nature and character, life-giving and powerful expressions of the Lord of love and life, we want to make sure that what we are saying is Biblical and consistent with God's revealed Word. The final step in FACETS to complete your Story Box is to choose Scripture that shows that this chapter in your life is connected to God's story. Scripture is the best way to do that and will give anyone hearing your Story Box testimony a passage to return to and to apply to their own life. 

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