PACKING FOR THE JOURNEY

It is a foolish thing to make a long prologue, and to be short in the story itself. —2 Maccabees 2:32 (KJV)

Myths and stories make order out of chaos. They explain things. Sometimes they are based in actual—at least as we would understand it—fact: accounts of real kings and real battles, real people in real places.

Other stories appear on the surface to be nothing more than fanciful fairy tales—wild stories of giants and monsters and superheroes. But just because it's a tale of a dreaded creature with a bull's head on a human body (or vice versa!), doesn't mean that the story itself can't be "true"—or at least have elements of truth. The principal elements of the story—dragons, ogres, and neurotic clown fish—may be the product of someone's vivid imagination, but the human emotions, the understanding of the human condition, may be absolutely dead on.

The best animated films—Bambi, Beauty and the Beast, Spirited Away, Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Shrek—are about crazy creatures who express very human sentiments and feelings in an honest, revealing way. Once you get past the fact that Shrek is a green ogre, he's like a lot of people you know! The stories of Moses, King Saul, King David, Peter, and Paul also reveal—perhaps inadvertently—the real people who are often hidden behind the theology.

How important are these stories? Or any stories, for that matter?

Well, for one thing, Jesus used stories almost exclusively to reveal the most difficult—often most important—truths about his ministry and the kingdom of God. We call them parables, but they're really mini-stories.

The Bible itself is full of stories, from the parting of the Red (or Reed) Sea to Pentecost. But the central truth of the Bible—God has a wonderful plan for your life and that plan is possible through a belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ—is a story too.

Here's something pretty neat: we are God's story. How we live our lives constitutes the elements of that story.

Life is a journey; it isn't a destination, as one of my friends used to say. We're in the process of becoming Christians. Our story, then, is the account of that journey. Who we meet along the way. How we respond. The barriers we encounter. How we overcome them. That's the story of our lives—as kids, as teenagers, as young adults, as adults, as senior citizens—as we try to be more like Christ.

It's a pretty confusing trip. Events are complicated. People are complicated. And story is how we make sense out of confusion. Joyce Carol Oates says that our "obliqueness" to each other is made clear only through story (from a speech at Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing, 2004).

Look at it another way. In Genesis, the account says that God spoke creation into being: "Then God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light" (Genesis 1:3). Skip ahead to the Gospel of John, which starts: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). Creation is whispered into creation by the great lion Aslan in the Narnia books. Creation is also sung into being in J. R. R. Tolkien's Silmarillion, the prequel to The Lord of the Rings. Words are at the center of all this. And it is with words that storytellers tell the weird, wonderful, amazing, goofy, incredible, and sometimes downright unpleasant stories of our lives.

That's where we come in. It's not enough just to write the words—you've got to be the words! You are the words! Your life is a story that someone (or Someone) will read someday.

For me, that's always been a scary thought. I'm not sure what I'm doing—much less what everybody else should be doing. (My father worked at the gigantic headquarters of all U.S. military forces in the world—the Pentagon—in Washington, D.C. He said the best description of the Pentagon he ever heard was to imagine a flood. In the middle of that raging flood is a single battered log. Clinging desperately to that log are thousands of ants. And each ant thinks he's driving the log.) Reading the experiences and adventures of other people helps me. It helps to know that I'm not alone in what I'm doing or feeling. It helps me see different points of view. It helps me see how different people handled different problems.

Katherine Paterson has written some of the best books ever created for young adults (although they're great for all ages), including Bridge to Terabithia and Jacob Have I Loved. She says that writers write a story and invite the reader to create the meaning (in a speech at the Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing, 2004). That means that every story is different for each person who reads it.

When the Roll is Called Up Yonder and my life's story is being read by Somebody Pretty Important, I'd kind of like a little help down here. I'd like to know everything there is to know about the story—the journey—I'm in the middle of undertaking. I want to know what I should be looking for. I want to know how to read the story. I want to know what to take away from the story, how to make sense of it all. It means that—in addition to the historical facts or fantasy elements of a story—it is important to pay attention to the story itself. How is the story framed? What is the storyteller trying to accomplish with this story? What's to be learned from all of this? The stories of the Bible are there for a reason. The parts of the story that are included—or omitted—are done so for a reason, maybe a lot of reasons. Wouldn't it make sense to understand why?

Understanding the Story

One way to get a handle on that concept is to know a little about the various types of story forms. A storyteller uses each story form for a different set of reasons.

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before. (Willa Cather, O Pioneers! [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999],...