A few weekends ago, I drove to Pennsylvania farm country with my wife to celebrate her college homecoming and reunion.
We had a great time and it was thrilling for me to meet so many of her friends that I had heard stories about. I was amazed watching my wife relive her time at college. We all sat around for hours swapping stories. There was a wonderful familiarity, fondness, and closeness that permeated the conversations.
These memories were exhilarating for me to hear, and even more so, for this group of friends to share. There was laughter, reflection, and tears; but all of it brought these friends closer. The re-telling of these shared stories brought these friends back to the beginning after being geographically spread apart. Back in time to a place and space they all shared and loved.
Good stories do that, don't they? We love stories because of the power and influence they have on us. Stories often "take us back" to places, people, and times long ago. We yearn for these memories and moments because they remind us of our roots, a place of fondness, familiarity, and grounding in an ever-changing world around us. Old photos, videos, songs, and visits to places can take us back.
As I sat there over the weekend with my wife's friends (whom I now consider my friends as well), I thought about my college friends. Every time we get together we continually rehash the old stories of our "glory" days playing baseball.
There is something magical when we get together. Year after year we re-tell the same exact stories, and never grow tired of them. In fact, I would argue that these stories actually grow in interest, enthusiasm, and sometimes exaggeration as the years go by and help us grow closer as friends. No matter what happens in our lives (divorce, loss of jobs, tough pregnancies, miscarriages, financial troubles), we will always have these stories and we will always have each other. And that is a very powerful reality.
Donald Miller writes in his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years that we are each given a story to live out. The only question is: what kind of story are we living? Are we living interesting stories? Stories that we will be re-telling 10, 20, and 50 years down the road.
As youth workers, are we helping and inspiring our students to live out the full potential of their story?
Are we telling them good stories that they will want to re-tell to others?
One of the reasons the Christian faith captivates me is the reality that I am part of a much bigger (and really exciting) story of God. The Bible helps narrate this story as lived out over time through generations of faithful people of God. By the telling and re-telling of these Bible stories, we are connected to The Story and reminded of our roots. A sense of familiarity, closeness, and home can be experienced as we share these stories of faith and faithful people from times ago.
Just as it is important to re-tell stories, it is also crucial to always be making new ones. If my wife's friends got together every few years and only told stories of the past, I wonder how deep their friendships would or could grow? If my friends and I got together and only relived our "glory" days, then our friendship would eventually become only a thing in the past. Eventually, our friendships would cease to have much meaning and significance to the people we are today and are becoming.
In some ways, we view our faith like that at times. As youth workers, we teach the biblical stories that way. We teach historical events of faith that happened once upon a time. We want our students to know the stories, but seldom do our students feel and experience the stories. If we are good storytellers, we may captivate our students' attention for a while with stories of faith; but at the end of the day, they are seen as stories that have no real bearing on life today.
However, what friends have inherent in them is the ability to create new stories each time they are together. This past weekend, as the stories were being shared, an entire new story was unfolding before our eyes. I have no doubt that 10 years from now, we will look back on this weekend with similar fondness and laughter.
We should be great storytellers of the faith while journeying with our students to form new stories of faith lived out in community. Faith not simply found in pages of scripture, but a faith that is encouraged and inspired to live out great stories today.
God was and still is on a mission of redemption and we have an active role in the Story. God is actively bringing this world to its intended purpose of wholeness, completion, and salvation. This story has a beginning and will have an ending, but it is not fully written….not yet. We are part of the story. We are in the story. We are the story.
People will look back on our lives and see a story. What kind of story will they see? In our faith journey as youth workers, are we encouraging ourselves and our students to live full, robust, active, and exciting stories?
I honestly hope that the best is yet to come for me and my friends, and the same for my wife and her friends.
And I equally hope and pray that the best is yet to come in our Story.
May our stories be more exciting and awe-inspiring tomorrow then they were yesterday.
May we build upon the legacy of faith we have been given and add to it each day.