Tell what He has done

A man who has terrified an entire region sits quietly in the grass. For as long as anyone can remember he has lived among the tombs, naked, gashing himself with stones, screaming through the nights so that the whole shoreline learned to keep away. Chains never held him. Now he is dressed, calm, in his right mind, sitting at the feet of the One who set him free. And he asks the obvious thing: let me come with You. Jesus says no, and hands him instead an assignment harder and humbler than discipleship on the road. Go home, He says, to your own people, to the very ones who knew you at your worst, and tell them what the Lord has done for you, and how He had mercy on you. No theology degree. No sermon. Just the story, his own: this is how I was, and this is what He did. The psalmist had called for exactly this centuries before, let the redeemed of the LORD say so. Reorientation hands you a testimony for one simple reason. You have a before, and you have an after. And a changed person plainly telling their own true story is the most disarming witness there is.

You may be certain you have nothing to offer as a witness, no training, no eloquence, no gift for words. The man among the tombs had none of that either, and Jesus sent him out anyway with the simplest assignment imaginable: go home and tell them what the Lord has done for you. Not what He has done in general. What He has done for you. That is the testimony no one can argue you out of, because it is not a position to be debated but a life that was changed. Be careful, though, of one quiet lie: that what God did in your upheaval was too small or too ordinary to mention. The honest before-and-after of your own story, told plainly to the people who knew you before, reaches places no polished argument can touch. The redeemed, the psalm says, should simply say so. So say so. Not impressively. Just truthfully, to the ones who remember who you were, this is how I was, and this is what He did.