Tell Me a Story

I had a crush on Andy Speight for YEARS before we dated each other.  In graduate school, my roommate, Ashley, dragged me to every home ECU football game. We tailgated with her family in the same place for each game, and inevitably we would always see Andy on his way to the game with a Bojangles bag in hand.  I remember Ashley’s sister telling us, “One of you needs to date that guy.  He seems so nice, and he is single” and Ashley responding, “Yeah well, Shannon is trying.”  I love telling Andy that story.  Even more, I love showing him old prayer journals where I have prayed that God would help me meet someone with whom I could have a lasting relationship and specifically mentioning his name.  I tell the stories about the game and the journals to him so often that he rolls his eyes every time I manage to work them into the conversation and gives me the deep sigh I’m accustomed to getting from teenagers.  And you know what?  I don’t care he acts like that.  I’m not going to stop telling him those types of stories.  I’m not going to stop reminding him about how cute I thought he was when I first met him my freshmen year of college or how I vividly remember respecting him enough to ask him Biblical questions when I was a sophomore or how when I was a senior, I saw him at a bar playing pool with a girl I knew and how even though everyone else was really excited for him because she was a cool girl, I was disappointed and a little sad because it meant he wasn’t available.  Telling him those memories is important because it reminds him that we have a history.  We have a story.  He matters to me, and he mattered to me long before he ever thought he did. 

 

I love stories like the memories I have of my husband before he was my husband because they make up our relationship. Stories bring people together and keep us close.  They sew us up like a quilt.  They remind us that we share common ground.  They also give us the power to keep people alive for generations.  I never knew either of my grandfathers, but the stories my parents and aunts and uncles tell make me feel as if I knew them.  I’m ashamed to admit it, but some days I can barely remember my Grandma Vaughn even though she was so special to me, but when I hear or tell a story about her, I can almost touch her.  I can feel the way she hugged me, and taste the crisp apples she always cut up for my snack, and hear her sing-song voice telling me, “I love you a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck.”  Stories give me access to her the way my foggy memory can’t.

 

The same is true with God.  Andy and I picked Deuteronomy 6:1-12 to be read in our wedding.  It is God’s instructions to the Israelites to remember his actions on their behalf especially when they enter the Promised Land.  He tells them, “And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands that I am giving you today.  Repeat them again and again to you children.  Talk about them when you are at home and when you are on the road, when you are going to bed and when you are getting up.  Tie them to your hands and wear them on your foreheads as reminders.  Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”  God knows that his people are forgetful so to remember him and his goodness he tells us to talk about his word all the time – to never forget what he has done for us.  Deuteronomy 6:12 says, “Be careful not to forget the Lord, who rescued you from slavery in the land of Egypt.”  The Passover Seder was a time specifically set aside for the Jewish people to tell the story of their deliverance from slavery.  The meal had a specific order and each cup of wine symbolized a different part of God’s character and mercy. As they enjoyed the meal, the people told the story of God’s faithfulness to them as a people when he took them out of Egypt and most certainly they also reflected upon his faithfulness in their individual lives. 

 

The Jewish people still celebrate Passover.  I have several Jewish students in my classes this year, and I love hearing them talk about the feasts and holidays from the Old Testament.  Recently, they finished celebrating Passover.  We happened to have a party during the Passover season, and the boys in my classroom couldn’t eat the cookies we brought because they weren’t allowed have wheat products during Passover.  They avoid wheat to remember the unleavened bread God provided the Israelites when they were journeying from Egypt to the Promised Land.  Thousands of years have passed, and still the Jewish people are telling each other the story of God’s faithfulness in their time of need.  They are reminding themselves in tangible ways that he has been faithful before and will be faithful again.

 

Andy and I picked the scripture from Deuteronomy for the same reason the Jewish nation is still telling it – we wanted to remind ourselves on our wedding day to keep telling the stories of God’s faithfulness.  God has been so good to us – individually and as a couple.  There were times in our relationship, when we didn’t see how we’d ever end up married, but God kept making ways for us.  His handprint on our lives was clear, and we didn’t want to end up in our own “promised land” and forget all that he had done for us.  We want to be a couple who tell each other over and over what God has done and, when we have kids, we want to tell them too.  We want to answer the question, “How do we know we can trust God?” by pointing to stories from one, two, five, and ten years ago.  Stories that we tell as easily as we tell those from thousands of years ago when we read the Bible to our family.

 

You see, that is the power of stories.  They are never too old to tell.  Whenever a story is told, every original thought and feeling and belief we had when the story took place becomes real again.  When I tell Andy stories about my feelings for him before we dated, I am transported back in time, and I am standing in that living room shaking his hand or opening the door to my college apartment to ask him about the Hebrew Bible or leaning against that bar stool at Tiebreakers watching him bend over the pool table with his new girlfriend.  The situation becomes real again.  On the night we got engaged, before he proposed, Andy started telling me stories about God’s faithfulness in some of the obstacles we faced in dating.  When he spoke, I felt waves of God’s peace and glory wash over me.  I felt like I was back in the middle of those times when I felt unbelievably helpless, and I was watching God move again.

 

Stories give us a second chance to live God’s faithfulness.  They remind us that he has been there before and will be there again.  They give us a place to point and say, “If he can do that, then surely he can do this.”  They are important to tell over and over.  They are important to pass down through generations so that our children can hold onto a heritage of stories that remind them of God’s faithfulness to their entire family.  Stories are bigger than we are, and they will last long after we are gone.  They are powerful reminders that we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, and they keep alive God’s character and trustworthiness and wonderful faithfulness forever.