On the worst night of his life, Simon Peter stood beside a charcoal fire. Jesus had been arrested and taken to the high priest’s house, and Peter followed as far as the courtyard. “Now the slaves and the guards were standing around a charcoal fire they had made, warming themselves because it was cold. Peter also was standing with them, warming himself” (John 18:18). Three times that night someone asked whether he was one of Jesus’ disciples, and three times he said no. “Then Peter denied it again, and immediately a rooster crowed” (18:27).
A few weeks later, after the resurrection, Peter and several other disciples had fished all night on the Sea of Galilee and caught nothing. A man on the shore told them where to cast the net, and when they came ashore, “they saw a charcoal fire ready with a fish placed on it, and bread” (John 21:9). The Greek word John uses, anthrakia, appears only twice in the New Testament: in the courtyard where Peter denied Jesus, and on the beach where Jesus restored him. Anyone who has smelled a charcoal fire knows how quickly the smell brings a memory back. Jesus didn’t erase Peter’s worst memory. He met him beside it.
Then Jesus asked him three times, “Do you love me?”, once for each denial, and gave him the same assignment three times over: “Feed my lambs… Shepherd my sheep… Feed my sheep” (21:15–17). Decades later, when Peter wrote to the elders of the churches, his charge to them was the one Jesus had given him that morning: “Give a shepherd’s care to God’s flock among you” (1 Peter 5:2). The worst night of his life and the best morning of his life had become part of the same story, and his calling grew out of both.
Your life has fires like that, and people who met you beside them. This session opens the Shaping section of the course. It asks you to look back at the story you’ve already lived.
So the question is:
What has God been doing in the story you’ve already lived?
Opening Prayer (Say this aloud!)
Father, You were there for every part of my story, including the parts I’d rather forget. Walk back through it with me. Show me the turning points, and what You were doing in them. Show me the people You sent, and what they left in me. Where memories are painful, be close, and let me see them with You instead of alone. In Jesus’ name, amen.
God tells His people to remember what He has done, and He gives them ways to mark it. The milestones in your life are worth remembering on purpose, because they’re where God’s shaping is easiest to see.
When Israel crossed the Jordan River into the land God had promised them, the water stopped flowing and the people walked across on dry ground. Before they moved on, God had Joshua choose twelve men, one from each tribe, to carry a stone out of the middle of the riverbed:
“The stones will be a reminder to you. When your children ask someday, ‘Why are these stones important to you?’ tell them how the water of the Jordan stopped flowing before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it crossed the Jordan, the water of the Jordan stopped flowing. These stones will be a lasting memorial for the Israelites.”
The stones had one job: to make people ask a question, so that the story would be told again. A generation later, Samuel did the same thing after God delivered Israel from the Philistines: “Samuel took a stone and placed it between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, saying, ‘Up to here the Lord has helped us’” (1 Samuel 7:12). Ebenezer means “stone of help.” It marked a turning point, and it looked back over the whole road that led there.
Moses told Israel to do the same thing with their wilderness years: “Remember the whole way by which he has brought you these forty years through the desert so that he might, by humbling you, test you to see if you have it within you to keep his commandments or not” (Deuteronomy 8:2). The whole way, not only the victories. The forty years had included rebellion, judgment and grief. God wanted all of it remembered, because He had been at work in all of it.
That’s what Step 13 asks you to do. It isn’t asking for a résumé. It asks for your memorial stones: the experiences that turned your direction, changed what you believed or reshaped your walk with God.
J. Robert Clinton, who spent decades studying how God develops leaders, found that God’s shaping tends to cluster around what he called boundary events, the turning points between one season of life and the next. They include crises, promotions, a new ministry, learning a major new concept, unusual experiences, life-changing encounters with a person, a divine guidance experience and a geographic move. Clinton also found that the leaders who grew the most learned to look at their own history a particular way:
“A sovereign mindset is a way of viewing life’s activities so as to see and respond to God’s purposes in them. It often takes a paradigm shift to move from ‘Why me?’ kinds of questions to ‘What are you shaping in me through this?’ kinds of questions.”
J. Robert Clinton · Professor of leadership, Fuller Theological Seminary · The Making of a Leader, 1988
What were You shaping in me through this? That’s the question to ask of every stone you set up in Step 13.
Illustration
One woman in an actual group that worked through these steps did exactly that, almost without meaning to. She wrote down five memories. The first was running wild in the countryside of her mother’s homeland as a child: “Days spent looking for fairies, trying to catch rabbits and coming home with nettle stings.” The second was the births of her children. The third was Saturday nights in her mother’s kitchen, crowded with family, “Stories and debates and laughter you could hear from the street.” Then the early years with the man she married, and finally her baptism in the sea, “going under that cold green water and coming up feeling like my life was brand new.”
Then she read back over the list and wrote one more sentence: “I see that a lot of this has feeling a part of something - a family, a culture, part of someone, a covenant. It’s all when I felt that I somehow belonged.” Five stones, and one thread running through all of them. That’s what Step 13 is looking for.
Pause & Reflect
If you had to choose one memorial stone from your life, one experience you’d want your children or grandchildren to ask about, what would it be?
The experiences that shape us most deeply are usually not the pleasant ones. Some milestones are mountaintops: a wedding, a birth, a conversion, a call. But most people, asked to name the events that changed them most, name a valley.
The best-known psalm in the Bible makes its turn in the valley:
“Even when I must walk through the darkest valley (צַלְמָוֶת), I fear no danger, for you are with me; your rod and your staff reassure me.”
Word Study
צַלְמָוֶת ṣalmāwet H6757
“darkest valley” · Psalm 23:4
Range. Deep shadow; deep darkness; “death-shadow.” Strong’s derives it from ṣēl (“shadow”) and māwet (“death”), which is where the King James “valley of the shadow of death” comes from. Brown-Driver-Briggs notes that many scholars instead read it ṣalmût, “darkness,” from a root found in related languages. It occurs eighteen times in the Hebrew Bible, most often in poetry, often alongside words for darkness and night.
The sense here. The deepest darkness a person can walk through, including, but not limited to, the threat of death. The NET’s “darkest valley” follows the “deep darkness” reading; the KJV’s “shadow of death” follows the older derivation. Either way, it’s the worst place on the road.
Why it carries the argument. Read Psalm 23 slowly and notice the pronouns. In verses 1–3 David speaks about the Lord: “He takes me to lush pastures… He restores my strength.” In verse 4, in the darkest valley, he starts speaking to Him: “for you are with me.” The psalm stays in the second person from there on: “You prepare a feast before me” (23:5). In the valley, He became You. That’s why the valleys in your story matter so much for this step. They’re often where God stopped being someone you knew about and became someone you knew.
Source. Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon; Strong’s Concordance via Bible Hub.
Peter’s story shows the same pattern. The denial was his darkest valley, and it was where he learned what Jesus’ love was actually like: not a reward for his loyalty, but a gift given after his failure. Jesus’ last words in that conversation were a prophecy about how Peter would die: “when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and others will tie you up and bring you where you do not want to go.” John explains, “Now Jesus said this to indicate clearly by what kind of death Peter was going to glorify God.” And then Jesus told him, “Follow me” (John 21:18–19). The man who had denied Jesus beside one charcoal fire would die for Him, and he would spend the years in between shepherding the flock.
You’ll probably find the same thing in your own list. In an actual group that worked through these steps, ten of the fourteen people who answered Step 13 named at least one valley among their most memorable experiences, and for several it was the experience that mattered most. One man’s first milestone wasn’t an event at all but a discovery: “Learning that God isn’t the author of my pain and struggles - This completely upended my understanding and then my perspective of God.” One woman wrote that the worst loss of her life had led her back to church and back to Christ, and had left her wanting to help others through the same valley: “I look back and see how Christ sustained me and comforted me.” For her, too, He had become You.
Notice what happened next. Peter turned around, saw John, and asked, “Lord, what about him?” Jesus answered, “If I want him to live until I come back, what concern is that of yours? You follow me!” (21:21–22). Session 7 warned you about comparing your heart with anyone else’s. Jesus says the same about your story. It’s yours. So is His call on it.
Caution
This step asks you to revisit your history, and for some people that history includes abuse, violence, betrayal, addiction or loss that still hurts. Please don’t work through trauma alone in a journal. If a memory surfaces that overwhelms you, stop, and talk with someone you trust: a pastor, a mature friend or a counselor. Kingdom Essentials Sessions 18 through 21 walk through forgiveness and freedom in Christ, and they’re a good place to start. You don’t have to write down every detail to complete Step 13. You can simply name a hard season, note that God was there, and come back to it later. This course can wait while you get the help you need.
Pause & Reflect
Where in your story did God stop being He and become You?
God shapes you through people. Some of the most important turning points in your story probably have a face attached to them.
Timothy’s story shows how many hands can be involved. He grew up in Lystra, “the son of a Jewish woman who was a believer, but whose father was a Greek” (Acts 16:1). Paul later reminded him where his faith began: “I recall your sincere faith that was alive first in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice, and I am sure is in you” (2 Timothy 1:5). Before Paul ever met him, “the brothers in Lystra and Iconium spoke well of him” (Acts 16:2). Then Paul took him along, and Timothy watched him up close for years: “You, however, have followed my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, my faith, my patience, my love, my endurance, as well as the persecutions and sufferings that happened to me” (2 Timothy 3:10–11). A grandmother, a mother, a church and a mentor all shaped one young man.
Lois still turns up in people’s stories. In an actual group that worked through these steps, five of the fourteen who answered Step 14 named a grandparent among the people who shaped them most: a grandmother who “loved me unconditionally” and was “my only steady/stable & encouraging influence” from birth until her late teens; another whose “faith, her strength, and her heart towards her family” one woman still carries; a grandfather whose “passion for learning and teaching” one woman still feels whenever she trains someone.
When Paul wrote to him, he opened with a word that sums up that relationship:
“to Timothy, my genuine (γνησίῳ) child in the faith. Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord!”
Word Study
γνήσιος gnēsios G1103
“genuine” · 1 Timothy 1:2
Range. Thayer defines it as “legitimately born, not spurious; genuine, true, sincere.” It’s related to the words for birth and becoming (genesis, ginomai). It occurs four times in the New Testament: of the “genuineness” of the Corinthians’ love (2 Corinthians 8:8), of a “true companion” (Philippians 4:3), and of Timothy and Titus as Paul’s genuine children in the faith (1 Timothy 1:2; Titus 1:4).
The sense here. A legitimate child: not an imitation, not an adopted name only, but the real thing. Paul wasn’t Timothy’s father; Timothy’s father was a Greek (Acts 16:1). But in the faith, Timothy was Paul’s true son. The related adverb, gnēsiōs, appears only once in the New Testament, and it’s about Timothy too: Paul has “no one here like him who will readily demonstrate his deep concern for you,” literally who will genuinely care for them (Philippians 2:20). And Paul adds, “like a son working with his father, he served with me in advancing the gospel” (2:22).
Why it carries the argument. The deepest kind of influence doesn’t just teach you things. It reproduces something. Timothy carried a family resemblance to Paul, his genuine concern for the churches, because Paul had carried it first. That’s what Step 14 is looking for: not a list of people you admire, but the people whose faith, character or way of life you now carry, for good or ill.
Source. Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament; Strong’s Concordance via Bible Hub.
The man who led me to Christ decades ago gave me a piece of advice I’ve never forgotten: “Where you’ll be in five years depends on two things: the books you read, and the people you hang around with.” As I came to know Scripture, I realized that advice came straight out of it. “The one who associates with the wise grows wise, but a companion of fools suffers harm” (Proverbs 13:20). “Do not be deceived: ‘Bad company corrupts good morals’” (1 Corinthians 15:33). Psalm 1 opens with the same warning about the company we keep. And through the decades since, I’ve found it to be entirely true.
The same is true in the other direction. We’re all products of the people who’ve influenced us. We imitate the people we admire, sometimes without realizing it, and we try hard to avoid becoming the people we don’t. Scripture expects this and tells us to use it well: “Remember your leaders, who spoke God’s message to you; reflect on the outcome of their lives and imitate their faith” (Hebrews 13:7). Paul could even say, “Be imitators of me, just as I also am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1).
Clinton calls the most important of these people divine contacts and mentors. A divine contact is someone God brings into your life at a crucial moment to affirm you, give you insight, challenge you or open a door, sometimes for a single conversation. A mentor stays longer:
“Mentors are people who can readily see potential in a person. They can tolerate mistakes, brashness, abrasiveness, and so on, in order to see potential develop.”
J. Robert Clinton · Professor of leadership, Fuller Theological Seminary · The Making of a Leader, 1988
The same group described mentors in almost exactly Clinton’s terms. One man wrote of a friend who “never looked at me as any less than. He saw and drew out the best in me.” Another described an older coworker who “helped me uncover a lot of my potential and overcome mental hurdles I didn’t realize I had.” And one woman remembered a divine contact from her first months as a believer, an older woman in her church who discipled her and spoke prophetically about how God would use her: “At the time she was speaking those things all I kept thinking was NO WAY! She was right.”
Your influencers may include people you’ve never met. Clinton noted that many great leaders were deeply shaped by books, especially biographies of people who had walked with God before them. In that group, not one person named an author. Don’t leave yours off. An author whose book changed your life belongs on your Step 14 list.
Pause & Reflect
Who saw potential in you before you saw it in yourself?
For many readers this is the hardest question in the course so far, and it deserves to be stated honestly. When I list the people who influenced me most, the first names that come to mind aren’t mentors. They’re a father who left, a mother who couldn’t stop criticizing, a pastor who abused his authority, a spouse who betrayed me. They shaped me more than anyone else, and not in a good way. Am I supposed to write them down as “influencers,” as if they were gifts? And why would God have allowed them to shape me at all?
Some of that has to be conceded plainly. The harm was real, and nothing in this course asks you to call it good. Joseph never called his brothers’ betrayal good. What he said was, “As for you, you meant to harm me, but God intended it for a good purpose” (Genesis 50:20). Both halves of that sentence are true at once: the evil was theirs, and the purpose was God’s. As Session 1 put it, God didn’t erase the stray line; He worked it into the picture.
Here is where I land, and why. I believe the people who hurt you belong in your story, and that naming them honestly is part of seeing what God has been doing. Listing someone as an influence isn’t the same as approving of them, excusing them or reconciling with them. It’s telling the truth about what shaped you. Clinton found that God often uses what he called negative preparation, painful experiences that break a person loose from one season so they’ll accept the next. And many people discover, when they look closely, that they became who they are partly by contrast: they became a faithful father because theirs wasn’t, or learned to lead gently because they’d been led harshly. That’s shaping too. In an actual group that worked through these steps, several people listed someone like this without being asked. One woman wrote that watching her parents’ marriage, “in a strange way,” had been “a ‘cautionary tale’ and helps me be committed to not repeat these behaviors.” Another remembered her father telling her you sometimes have to step on a few fingers to climb the corporate ladder: “That only made my resolve to not ever want any position of power, even stronger.”
Where this stays unresolved. Scripture holds two things together without fully explaining how they fit: that human beings are truly responsible for the harm they do, and that God is sovereign over it and can bring good out of it (Genesis 50:20; Romans 8:28). Scripture never says why a particular person was allowed to hurt you, and this course won’t pretend to. What it does promise is that the pain isn’t wasted, and that God was with you in the valley even when you couldn’t feel it.
In Session 1 you saw the corner of a dot-to-dot picture drawn for this course, with forty-five of its dots connected. Here’s the same picture now:
Sessions 3 through 7 gave the picture its colors and their intensity: your design, and the heart God gave you. The Shaping section looks at the lines themselves: the path your life has actually taken, dot by dot.
You couldn’t see these lines while you were drawing them. When you were in the middle of a hard season, it may have felt like the pencil was wandering. But look back from here and some of the shape begins to appear. That’s exactly what this session asks you to do. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said it this way:
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
Søren Kierkegaard · Danish philosopher · Journals, 1843 (as usually condensed)
Some of the lines on your page are ones you’d rather erase. Session 10 will come back to those. For now, look for the lines you can see, and let the Artist show you what He was drawing.
Everything above has been explanation. God tells His people to remember “the whole way” He has led them and to mark the turning points, as Israel did with the stones from the Jordan. The valleys often shape us most, because they’re where God so often stops being He and becomes You. God shapes us through people, and the deepest influence reproduces something genuine in us, as Paul’s did in Timothy. And even the people who hurt us belong in the story, not because the harm was good, but because God can work it into the picture.
Now you set up your stones and name your people.
Before you start Step 13, draw your life.
Turn a sheet of paper sideways, or open a blank page in your journal, and draw a long horizontal line across the middle. Put your birth at the left end and today at the right. Mark the years along the bottom.
Now plot the experiences you remember most. Put the good ones above the line and the hard ones below it, higher or lower depending on how much they affected you. Don’t worry about getting everything; you can add more later. Then look for the turning points: the places where the direction of your life changed. Mark each one with a small vertical line, the way Clinton marked the boundaries between phases of a leader’s life. Many people find that their turning points gather around a few kinds of events: coming to faith, a move, a loss, a new relationship, a new assignment, a crisis.
When you’re done, look at the whole page and ask one question: What were You doing here, Lord?
Discovery Steps · Steps 13 and 14
Use the Listening Rhythm for each step: ask to be searched; do the work; sit with it; test it with the witnesses; sleep on it.
Step 13 · My Experiences
The prompt. What life experiences are most memorable? Why and how?
What to do. Start with The Experience and your timeline. List every experience that stands out, then choose the five to seven that shaped you most. For each one, write three short lines: What happened, why it’s memorable and how it shaped me (what changed in your direction, your beliefs or your walk with God). Include at least one valley. Mark which of your experiences were turning points. For each turning point, ask Clinton’s question: What were You shaping in me through this? If a memory is too painful to write about in detail, name it in a few words and move on (see the Caution above).
What to produce. Your timeline, plus five to seven milestones in order of their impact on you, each with its what, why and how. Mark the turning points.
Surface answer: “Breaking bread with friends (Because friends are the true riches in this life!) Making a positive difference in someone else’s life (Because it feels so darn good!)…” (A real answer, and a warm one. It has a why for each memory, which is more than many first drafts have. But it has no how, nothing about what each experience changed, and no valley, though her later steps showed that her life held several.)
Deep answer: “My father’s death when I was nineteen. What happened: a heart attack, with no warning. Why it’s memorable: it was the first time I realized I had no answers for the biggest questions. How it shaped me: it started a two-year search that ended with me in a campus Bible study, and it’s why I still can’t walk past someone who’s grieving. Turning point: yes. This is where God became real to me.”
Worked examples.
You’re done when …
Time: at least two days. The timeline often surfaces memories that need a night’s sleep before you can see what they mean.
Step 14 · My Influencers
The prompt. What people have most influenced your life? Why and how?
What to do. List everyone who comes to mind: family, teachers, coaches, pastors, mentors, friends, bosses, authors. Include divine contacts, people you may have met only once but who said or did something you’ve never forgotten. If some of the people who shaped you most did so by hurting you, you may list them in a separate column headed Shaped me by contrast (see the What About above). You will likely have a fairly long list. Ask the Holy Spirit to help you rank them in order of impact, and to show you the reasons. For each of your top five to seven, write what they gave you and what you now carry because of them.
What to produce. A ranked list of your five to seven most important influencers, each with one or two sentences on why they influenced you and how: what of theirs you now carry.
Surface answer: “My mom, my pastor, my wife.” (Good names, but no why and no how.) A different kind of thin answer is just as common: “I can’t list individual names…” That one, from an actual group, was honest, and it usually means the person hasn’t yet looked back slowly enough. Go back to your timeline. Beside each turning point, ask, Who was there?
Deep answer: “Mr. Alvarez, my high school chemistry teacher. He stayed after school twice a week for a whole semester to help me catch up, and he told me I had a scientist’s mind when no one else thought I’d finish high school. I became an engineer because of him, and I tutor kids today because he tutored me.”
Worked examples.
You’re done when …
Time: at least one day; two if your list is long.
Big Ideas
Kingdom Principle
Nothing in your story is wasted. God was shaping you through every experience and every person, even the ones you’d never have chosen.
Closing Prayer (Say this aloud!)
Father, thank You for the whole way You’ve led me, the mountaintops and the valleys. Thank You for the people You sent: the ones who taught me, the ones who believed in me, and the ones whose faith I now carry. Where people hurt me, I bring those wounds to You, and I ask You to heal what still hurts and to work even those lines into Your picture. Show me what You were shaping in me through it all. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Go Deeper
Accessible
Chris Tiegreen, The One Year Hearing His Voice Devotional (2014). Daily readings on recognizing God’s voice in Scripture, circumstances and relationships, including in the story you’ve already lived.
Substantial
J. Robert Clinton, The Making of a Leader: Recognizing the Lessons and Stages of Leadership Development (1988; rev. ed. 2012). The source of this session’s timeline, boundary events, divine contacts and mentors.
Academic
J. Robert Clinton, Leadership Emergence Theory (1989). Clinton’s research manual, with the full catalog of “process items” God uses to shape leaders. Written for classroom use, and dense, but thorough.
Leading This Session
This session can take a group somewhere tender very quickly. Before you begin, remind everyone that no one has to share anything from their timeline, and that the valleys stay private unless someone chooses to share them. Read the Caution aloud. If someone becomes distressed, stop and pray with them, and follow up privately; don’t try to process trauma in a group setting. The most productive exercise is usually Step 14: invite people to share one influencer and what they now carry because of them. It’s often the most encouraging half hour in the course. Group questions: What’s one memorial stone from your life, and what does it mean to you? and Who saw potential in you before you saw it in yourself? Watch attendance closely from here on. In an actual group that worked through these steps, the Shaping steps were where the most people stopped, and the people who wrote the most honestly about their valleys were often the ones who most needed someone to check in with them afterward. Don’t ask anyone to retell a valley in the group. If someone’s Step 13 has no valleys at all, don’t push; it may be an honest answer, or it may be a “not yet.”
If you have questions or comments about this content, or about your personal situation, email us at feedback@thedisciplespath.com.
Next: Session 9, Your Measure, asks where you carry authority and where you’ve already borne fruit: the sphere God has assigned you, and the victories that have shaped you.
Session 8 · Kingdom Purpose
Your Story
What has God been doing in the story you’ve already lived?
Stones by the Jordan
Remember the whole way. Mark the turning points, and ask what God was shaping in you.
The Darkest Valley
The valleys shape us most. In the darkest valley, He becomes You.
The People Who Shaped You
The deepest influence reproduces something genuine in us, even by contrast.
So · Now
Nothing in your story is wasted. God was shaping you through every experience and every person.
Draw your timeline, then complete Step 13 (your experiences) and Step 14 (your influencers).
Discovery Steps · Steps 13 and 14
Kingdom Principle
Nothing in your story is wasted. God was shaping you through every experience and every person, even the ones you’d never have chosen.