What's in a story?

Lets take a look at some key points of a story.


1) The telling of the story.

"As a youth worker, particularly in the Christian circles, I tell a lot of stories to the younglings I work with, and a lot of them are about my past. It just so happens that things this week have seemed to centre around college, and looking back I may have had a laugh but I really wasted it, and almost completely wasted myself. Don't get me wrong I don't regret college, as if I did it'd just kill me as there's a lot to regret about it, but instead it makes me feel ashamed. My whole time there was my spiralling off the rails, before hitting rock bottom after getting to uni really."

There is a danger, however, in this area as I have just demonstrated, sometimes we start to re-live a story, we re-live all the feelings, and experiences, and sometimes we can get caught up in ourselves re-living that memory. Particularly in areas such as drugs, sex and alcohol abuse from our past, all things I have struggled with, we can over highlight the thrill, and seemingly 'good' points of that and seem to be condoning that behaviour which isn't our mission and warriors of hope and of light. Alternatively we can alienate the listener from ourselves as we reopen wounds and struggles and spiral off once again into loss, darkness, and ultimatley death. We may even cause our listener(s) to do the same.


2) The context of the story.

"Don't get me wrong, it's not all sob story, as the situations I talked to people here about tend to be ones that they can relate to. I look at these times now and see a story of hope and of redemption, which is something I wrote prolifically on, ironically in terms of suicide back then. I don't feel the utter despair of the situation, of how I abused myself, and of how I abused other people around me, I have the bigger picture, I have the context."

What is a story without it's context, the before and after, the current and surroundng situation, the bigger picture? We need to keep context with our stories. British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said “I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning , or destroyed it altogether”. I think that if we take away our story's context then we risk taking God out of that situation. As with my earlier scenario, the story I have been telling, if I took out the aftermath, where God saved me, then I'm just telling you how depressed, binge drinking, drug taking, and generally wild and twisted I was, and I might still well be, or I may have just made the thing up to scare you. Put in the context of God breaking into my situation when I hit rock bottom and started digging, and you get a beauty and a depth that was missing without it, you get the truth of God's mercy, the truth of God's grace, and ultimately the truth of God's love.


3) The point of the story.

"As I was talking to the lads about college, they started asking questions, about the change, about me now. Interestingly there aren't any direct questions asked about God, but I get to talk to them about that anyway as he is integral to the outcome.I don't know if they took it in, if they'll put it into practice, but I can always hope and pray for them. Thats the point, planting the seeds of God's love, grace, and mercy."


I could tell you a story, any story, because I'm a natural story-teller, I'm not saying I'm good at it, just that it's my natural instinct to tell people stories, but would there be any reason to if there wasn't a point to my telling of the story? I tend to tell stories to illustrate points I'm trying to make, taking my cue from who I think is one of the greatest story-tellers of all time, Jesus Christ himself. Jesus never told stories unless they had a point, a meaning, and today we call them parables, but none-the-less they are stories. He took the situations people were in or familiar with and told people stories to educate them at times, sometimes he told stories to show people how stupid they were being, but he always had a point. I don't think people will take our stories seriously if we don't have a point to them. Even great nonsense stories like the Alice stories Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass had meaning, they had a point to them.



I love stories, and I pray that you do too, and that in every story you get to tell and recount the you do glory and justice to God, our Dad in Heaven
God bless,
Adam.