Stories

Part of my responsibilities as a youth worker is to help plan the once-yearly high school weekend retreat.

This last week, we were talking about the theme of the next year's gathering and we began talking, amongst other things, what it would have been like to have lived in the time of Jesus and to be one of the disciples and how that would have affected their lives to the very end.

I wondered if, after Jesus ascended to heaven, if the disciples and other followers got together for dinner and told the wonderful stories about their time with Jesus on earth, looking forward to the time in heaven retelling those stories. If one of them would say something and another would say, "Hey remember when Jesus did this...?" or, "remember that time when Jesus...." before launching into a well-loved, often-told tale.

During that District meeting, we jumped from talking about the disciples being part of a story just as our youth (and ourselves) part of that larger story. To mis-quote Don Miller, we're the trees, but the story is about the forest.

In my house church, we are beginning to read the gospels as part of a larger, narrative story (instead of piece by piece). I'm so excited to get into this because I think that the stories are something that my soul is needing right now. I'm ready to hear and live the story.

The stories give hope and humanity to things that are otherwise boiled down to memory verses, sound bites and moral tales. The stories matter