Storytelling

I have this series of videos introducing you all to my life in China to post on here, plus photos of Chinese New Year, but they’re trapped on my camera due to some technical issues. So you’ll have to settle for text, once again.

 

I just finished my first week of teaching, and am rediscovering how much I enjoy doing it. A lot of the day is spent listening to kids read and correcting pronounciation or grammar, which can be a little dry. However, I find lots of opportunity to ask questions to check comprehension, which gives me chances to teach extra little things here and there. I do games with a different age group each day for 20 minutes, and spend the last hour before I go to the boy’s home with the high school students. This is where I have the most fun – this week I’m trying to teach the idea of reading with emotion by comparing accomplished orrators. From that I’ll move into trying to instill a love for reading and telling their own stories. As I was making my notes, I kind of came to this realization – God loves stories. In fact, in the entire history of the world God has chosen to reveal Himself through the stories of those that loved Him, and never an ‘In His own words’ kind of story. Instead of showing up every few years for us all to see and saying ‘Hey, my name is Yahweh, I’m bigger than the universe, enjoy being both just and merciful at the same time, and am desperately in love with my children,’ He lets those that love Him tell the story.  Why is that? When you’re that awesome, why limit yourself to words on a page, penned by un-awesome, imperfect, normal human beings?

 

Keep in mind I started thinking about this last night, so if it’s not an entirely accurate or complete idea that’s why, but here’s my guess – if you read a story that moves you, and you read it to others like it moves you, you move your audience. When you write with passion, that passion transfers to your readers. Whether it’s sung in a song, told in a poem, seen in a movie, acted in a play, painted, written or just lived, a story moves people in proportion to how it moves the storyteller (or story-liver). So when David is on his face before the Lord in the Psalms writing poetry about his God and Saviour, or when Paul is writing about living for Jesus to the churches he knows so personally, some of their passion gets into you, the reader, even when you don’t remember to read it from their point of view. Their passion is transferable. I think if God wrote the bible from the first person perspective, we would come to love the people of the bible because that’s where the passion would be directed, instead of loving God by reading about Him in their lives. Maybe that’s why we don’t have a gospel written by Jesus himself. We instead have gospels written by His closest friends, the ones that loved Him, so that we too can feel what it’s like to be completely in love with all that He is, all that He does. Now, I realize all scripture is Spirit breathed, I’m not disputing that or suggesting that anything in the Bible isn’t of God. But the Spirit uses the hearts of man, and his hands, to tell the story, to reveal who God is to us, rather than telling it all from His perspective.

 

And so, the ‘My name is Yahweh’ example I gave above becomes something more like, ‘He is Yahweh, El Shaddai, Lord of Lords, King of Kings, Jehovah
Jira the great provider, my rock, who leads me to lie down in green
pastures and fear no evil. He is my God. He spans the cosmos with a handsbreadth,
calls the stars by name each night, commanded the light to be and it
was, holds the sands of the Earth in a basket at his waist and the
waters of the depths in the hollow of His hand. And while we were still
sinners He died for us that His blood would wash us clean, that we would be freed from the chains of death that we wrapped around ourselves as a warm blanket swadles a child. He did not consider it robbery to be called equal with God, and yet took on a life of servanthood and died a criminal’s death, naked and nailed to a tree, that we may know His heart for us. That we may know freedom. And that we may finally, truly, know Him.’

 

Surprise surprise, God knows the best way to do this stuff. How best to point us to Him, and as usual it’s not how we would do it.