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Telling Stories: How Small Stories Effect Profound Change

"It is important to tell our secrets, too; because it makes it easier that way to see where we have been in our lives and where we are going. It also makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own…"
—Frederick Buechner

"Your turn, Laura." Everyone in the van chanted and pointed.
"I don't have any good stories to tell," she quietly replied.
"C'mon, everyone has good stories to tell!" I hollered back from the driver's seat.
"I don't know. Nothing interesting ever happens to me," she said with a shrug.
But with a little coaxing and prompting, we were able to get Laura to tell a story.

This is a common scene on our many road trips. Bored and tired of fighting over the music, our attention turns to telling stories. In fact, once started, we often go around the van and make everyone tell one. No exemptions.

Sometimes I'll give a prompt like, "most gruesome accident," "best childhood punishment," "love story," etc. But usually one story begets another naturally, and the hours pass.

I can actually recall trips years ago by the tales told. Dave falling two stories and having his bicep impaled by a piece of steel? Work Trip '93. Mary's sidesplitting first kiss? Ministry Tour '95. Madge tearing the top off a U-Haul rental truck? That would be NYWC in Philly.

Story-Stirring

Over time, my Sunday morning creative Bible Study has cleared a permanent space for stories. Each week I recount a few stories from my life that might be as ridiculous as backing my car into the garage door or as touching as God's provision in a time of financial crisis. We also invite individual stories and tales from our group life. This time isn't a frivolous opener. Sharing stories of service, prayer, humor, events, church, and life in general draws us together and prepares our hearts to hear the most important story.

As youth workers, we're in the business of telling stories—God's stories and the stories of how God's people live. But I think we're also in the story- stirring business: helping students discover the unique story that's stirring in the middle of their lives. I believe it's imperative that we help draw these out. Each story reveals a jeweled facet of God. Even those goofy, irreverent freshmen who throw Skittles around have treasured stories worth hearing. My work is to help them dig them up, examine them, and share them.

If we don't share our stories collectively, we won't be able to have true spiritual community. I must know why you shudder or laugh or cry when we read God's story, pray, and worship. And likewise, you must know what fears, doubts, hopes, and longings assail my soul. We must know each other's stories. How else can we, with watchful eye, whisper to each other when the story begins to change?

What Makes a Story Good?

A great story, well told, puts us in the middle of it. Somehow we join the story, especially when we retell it. Great stories don't lose anything when retold. Each telling is unique, because the people, time, and environment are unique. Recently, I took my kids to see a storyteller. He drew us into the story with his facial expressions, his voices, his wild gestures, and at some points, active audience participation. I wasn't just hearing about two slaves who fell in love. I was in the woods listening to the proposal.

Stories are sticky. Great stories can put tears in our eyes. They can leave us howling with laughter or gasping for air. They give us the shivers with their horror or grossness. They make us swell with righteous rage and cause tender empathy to spring up. But in all things they stick. Stories stick. They haunt us with their unforgettable images. To borrow a phrase that Malcolm Gladwell coined, stories have "the stickiness factor."

In human communication, what could be stickier than a great story? As a teacher, retention is essential, and few communication tools have better return. If I want my teaching to stick, it must be full of stories.

Revealing the Holy

Telling stories reveal more than they actually tell. Growing up, I heard testimonies—just a fancy word for a story about God and me. From the heart-wrenching (broken lives) to the incredible (miraculous healings), these stories about encounters with the Holy God were tough to forget or discard, because the people standing in front had been profoundly changed. Their stories bore the fingerprints of God.

Telling stories is at the center of great teaching, effective evangelism, and healthy relationships. Madeleine L'Engle writes, "Story always tells us more than the mere words, and that is why we love to write it, and to read it."

Stories and the metaphors they leave behind are what I hang my life on. Who am I? What is my purpose here? What stirs my heart? What am I doing? Why am I doing it? The answers lie in my stories. Listen to my stories and discover a composite picture of not merely where I've been, but who I am. If you want to know why I'm in youth ministry, then you'll have to listen to a story about a college guy who heard God whisper at midnight on a junior high retreat.

Frederick Buechner explains, "My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours. Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way. It is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually."

Connected Stories

Our stories are unique yet bear striking familiarity. As the bearers of God's image, and as card-carrying sinful human beings, this is inescapable. We often end up telling stories of our human frailty, ridiculousness, and longings, whether they're simple short stories about the mundane or grand tales of beauty, perseverance, strength, courage, and fidelity. Telling stories carries us through the darkness and draws us toward hope.

The stories we tell remind others of their own stories. One summer I wrote a collection of personal disaster stories—partly for my students who love to hear them, partly for my own growing family, and partly so I wouldn't forget.

These small tales of pranks, clumsiness, and catastrophe prompted one comment more than any other; "It reminded me of…." My telling prompted others to remember. The Old Testament reminds us that we're in the business of remembering.

God's Story

God's living story is the centerpiece of our faith. The greatest story ever told isn't just about what happened, but what is happening. It's the story that gives all other stories meaning and purpose. Philip Yancey observes, "We are writing a small story with our lives, part of a larger story whose plot line we know in the sketchiest of details. Both the large and the small unfold like any story—with a beginning and end, with purpose and the action that resists it, with consequences that cannot be avoided, with accidents and unexpected interruptions. In the end the narrative incorporates all these details in a story line that achieves a satisfying fullness."

While speaking of the power of science fiction, Peter Edman observes, "Science fiction stories, because they are stories, get past our defenses. They make it possible even to enjoy the process of working through these issues…As with all fiction, the very exercise of reading becomes a moral act. We emotionally engage fictional characters who are utterly unlike ourselves, so stories become places where we can extend empathy and compassion to the other as we begin to recognize our common humanity...We read them finally because these stories open to us in ways no textbook could, glimpses of the beauty and the joy that is always present—however we might veil it in fear and doubt, metal and plastic—in a humanity created in the image of God."

When I listen to people's stories, I draw a little closer to them. I understand them a little better. The more of their stories I hear and treasure, the greater the intimacy grows between us. They've made themselves better known. They're sharing their most precious gift, the stories of their lives. Is God's story much different in this respect? As I read my Bible, I'm drawn into the story. When I struggle with lust, I consider my friend David's story. When I'm discouraged, I think of what my friend Paul said. When I wonder what I'm supposed to be doing with my life, I ponder what Jesus suggested just before he left earth.

The Power of Story

Telling stories isn't just to grab attention, though they often do. They aren't merely to provoke laughter or create a serious mood or convince someone to follow Christ. Telling stories can actually offer physical comfort. Madeline L'Engle speaks of the power of story: "Helen Muller was telling stories to children in hospital wards, many of whom where in severe pain. But while the children were listening to the stories, they did not feel the pain…Story was painkiller, quite literally. Story was a more effective painkiller than any chemical medication."

She writes, "Stories, no matter how simple, can be vehicles of truth—can be, in fact, icons. It's no coincidence that Jesus taught almost entirely by telling stories, simple stories dealing with the stuff of life familiar to the Jews of his day. Stories are able to help us to become more who, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art—to give a name to the cosmos we see despite all the chaos. God asked Adam to name all the animals, which was asking Adam to help in the creation of their wholeness. When we name each other, we are sharing in the joy and privilege of incarnation, and all great works of art are icons of Naming."

Embracing Our Stories

Can we call our students and leaders to face their stories, however difficult, embrace them, and tell them? Will their lives be changed as we encourage them to trust that their story is being redeemed and is a part of the overall story? Imagine the impact these stories might have on our spiritual community.

Philip Yancey writes, "As my faith grows, so does my confidence that my individual life is contributing in some small way to a larger story. My own story contains details that I regret and may even resent: pain from childhood, illness and injury, times of poverty, wrong choices, broken relationships, missed opportunities, disappointment in my own failures. Can I trust, truly trust, that God can weave these redemptively into my overall story, as 'unwilling instruments of grace'?"

Write your stories down. Tell your story boldly. Encourage others to do the same. Telling stories isn't just our job; it's our calling. Go ahead. It's your turn—your story—and only you can tell it.

Michael Collison is currently the associate pastor of senior high/post high for Appleton Community Evangelical Free Church in Appleton, WI.