“It’s just boring.”

That’s how we can sometimes view the story of our own salvation experience if doesn’t seem to have all the elements of a good Hollywood movie. If we’re not careful, we can find ourselves wishing we’d been saved out of a drug addiction or a life of crime. Or maybe that we’d had some sort of vision that led us from voodoo and witchcraft to the Savior.

Some of us have those stories. Most of us don’t.

My own story can seem so plain vanilla as to be embarrassing if I look at it wrong. I grew up going to church because my parents and their parents had for decades. I was taught and believed the Scriptures my whole life. I professed Christ and was baptized at age 10. Riveting stuff, huh? I can just see my neighbors beating a path to my door to hear more about that. Spielberg called just the other day to get the rights to film this one.

Now take Paul. There was somebody with a great story to tell. Persecutor of the church on a mission to yet another city to round up hated believers gets struck down by a blinding light and hears Christ speaking to him. “I have appeared to you to appoint you as a servant and as a witness.” Paul goes on to become one of the pillars of the church, even to the point of giving his life for the cause. That’s got blockbuster written all over it.

But here’s the interesting part. Paul surely retold his story many, many times but a sentence from the retelling in Acts 26:12-23 brings it all home for me. He’s standing in front of Roman governor Festus and King Agrippa and his sister Bernice – powerful people. If he can just get them sympathetic to his case (he’d been wrongly accused by the Jews), he can go free. If there’s a time for grandstanding, this is it. Instead he says, “I have had God’s help to this very day, and so I stand here and testify to small and great alike.” He then adds that his sole message is that the Christ (the Messiah) suffered, died, and rose again as predicted.

When I put the focus of my story all on ME and what happened to ME at the moment of MY salvation, the focus is totally in the wrong place. Yes, I do tell these things but they are not to be glorified. Paul had a killer story to tell, and he does include the details, but he also puts the focus where it belongs: On Christ. And when my part of the story fades into the background where it belongs and Christ takes the focus, the story is now that story that everyone needs to hear.