What’s Your Story? | From the Archives with Tosca Nathan

Kicking off 2026, we’re bringing back a favorite from the archives! Enjoy this 2024 conversation exploring how to connect with your own personal story.

What’s your story, and why does that matter? Long-time educator Tosca Nathan shares about the significance of knowing your story and connecting to God’s bigger story, especially as teachers.

• “Like any story, our life stories have a path, they have a trajectory, and it’s full of meaningful events, defining moments, key relationships, trials and disappointments, dreams and aspirations, passions and discoveries.”
• “How coherent your life story is and how coherently you can talk about your life story has been seen as a factor in well-being.”
• Coherence of time, thematic coherence, and contextual coherence
• “Your life story never exists in a vacuum. It is always part and parcel of a bigger story.”
• “In the telling itself, every time you tell it, there’s more meaning making that happens, so it’s important to tell your story.”
• “If teachers are not fully aware of who they are and have exercised all of the areas of coherence, they will not be as effective in their teaching.”
• “The teacher, with what they do or how they relate, helps the student understand how their story connects to bigger things.”
• “You can’t give what you don’t have.”
• “To realize that scholarship is part of that grand story completely changes why I even engage in research or why I engage in teaching and learning, and then on top of that, it elevates it to the level of worship.”

What’s changing our lives:

• Keane: Playing the board game, Sorry
• Heather: Reaction buttons on emails 
• Tosca: Reading the Bible through the lens of the grand story and watercolor painting

Weekly Spotlight: Lingo

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