Story Power

Of all of the ways to make money, telling sto­ries is still the fastest. It may take a cou­ple of years and a few hun­dred mil­lion dol­lars to make a bil­lion, but that is still light­ning speed when it comes to mak­ing money. All sorts of for­tunes have been made in the movie and book busi­ness. The myths often become extended into social and tech­no­logic real­i­ties. The cell phone is the result of see­ing Cap­tain Kirk flip open his wire­less com­mu­ni­ca­tor on some for­eign planet and being instantly con­nected to the Enter­prise. Sci­ence fic­tion has become sci­ence fact since the days of Jules Verne and beyond.

I make a liv­ing telling and adjust­ing sto­ries. In the pul­pit I re-tell the sto­ries of the Bible. In coun­sel­ing, I help peo­ple spin the tragic sto­ries of their lives into more hope­ful themes. Our great and small sto­ries are nar­ra­tives and para­bles of the inter­ac­tions between the Cre­ator and the cre­ated. The­ol­ogy and psy­chol­ogy are the inter­face between human­ity and Divin­ity — the phys­i­cal and the metaphysical.

Some sto­ries are bet­ter than oth­ers at bring­ing about com­pas­sion­ate change in world his­tory. The amaz­ing thing is how peo­ple will stick with a destruc­tive sto­ry­line in the face of bet­ter alter­na­tives. Worse yet, they set­tle for sto­ries that lead nowhere. Lost in the con­tem­po­rary, they die with no clas­sic res­ur­rec­tion story to give them hope.

The story power of your life is worth a novel or an epic movie, if you know how to tell your story as one also sent by God. It takes the imag­i­na­tion of faith and a child’s opti­mism, but you can do it. You play all of the parts on your life stage at one time or another. Some­times we are the vil­lain to our­selves and some­times the hero.

It is a drab winter’s day out­side — the per­fect set­ting for the great­est story ever told by you — which is also the one about you.