Tell A Good Story
Posted By admin on November 17, 2011
He knew how to tell a good story.
I like that line. I read it in a stranger’s obituary, but it told me more about him than all the other tributes put together. There went a man who could turn the mundane into the amusing, who could teach the benefits of virtue by relating the consequences of vice, a man who could attract an audience and then earn their admiration. I was glad his family recognized his gift. The world is a poorer place without him.
Good storytellers are hard to find. While being swamped with reams of information, we are nevertheless short of people who can convey it in meaningful ways that touch the heart as well as the head.
I had a rotund, jolly uncle who was a superb storyteller. He would sit in the bay window of the general store for hours on end, soaking up details of village life and then regaling people with stories of the characters who lived there. His tale about the local eccentric who picked up the community spinster on his way to deliver a wagonload of crabapples was a classic. When the train blew its whistle, the team of horses bolted, upsetting the apple cart right in the middle of town. Such a comedy of errors has seldom been told better than when my uncle described that scene.
Like every good storyteller, he had a mental library all categorized by subject matter. If you walked up to him and said, “Tell me about your hunting experiences,” he was hard pressed to remember any. But if you said, “Tell me about the time you tried to trap the skunk,” he would zero in on the topic without hesitating. Embellished with nicknames, loaded with details, the stories he told were so true to the situations and people we knew that we just reveled in them.
Identification with the characters involved is what makes us love a good story. Whether folk song or opera, lesson or sermon, we cannot help but listen if it centers on people just like us. That is one reason why the parables in the New Testament had such a profound impact on the crowds. Farmers could identify with sowing and harvesting and mustards seeds and weeds. Shepherds knew all about sheep and goats and lost lambs. Builders knew the importance of cornerstones and rock and sold foundations. Women were familiar with lost coins and marriage feasts and prodigal sons.
“The result was that when Jesus had finished these words, the multitudes were amazed at His teaching, for He was teaching them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.” (Matthew 7:29)
Whatever else His critics chose to level at Him, one fact they could not deny.
He knew how to tell a good story.
Do you?