The Power of Story

By Carol Kuykendall

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s the service started one recent Sunday morning, I began fixating on my shoes.

Why did I choose them this morning?

Why are they even in my closet? And what about my shockingly white ankles? Really, I should not go out in public unless I use that self-tanning lotion. What is the one my daughter uses?

I was totally absorbed in my critical analysis … until the speaker began telling her story about trying to climb Half Dome in Yosemite. Within seconds, I was drawn into the narrative with funny descriptions about how unprepared she was, how little she knew about the journey and her regrettable decision to turn around just short of the summit because she didn’t know what awaited at the top. I could smell the pine trees and feel the burn of her aching muscles. >>

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■ Carol Kuykendall helped create and launch Stories, a new ministry for women at her local church. Her passion is to train women to recognize, organize and tell their own stories. She is author and co-author of nine books, and former Director of Leadership Development at MOPS International where she still serves as a consulting editor.

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Who is a Storyteller?

If you’ve ever suffered, faced a fear, felt disappointed, depressed or doubtful, and you still have your faith, you have a story to tell. And God intends us to tell our stories. “If you are going to be used by God, he will take you through a multitude of experiences that are not meant for you at all; they are meant to make you useful in his hands,” writes Oswald Chambers, a prominent 19th century minister and teacher.

We are most useful when we’re willing to share our honest stories about the brokenness in our lives. That’s not a simple process. Storytelling often requires us to dig deeply into our souls to identify the defining moments that have shaped us into the people we are today. It means realizing that life is not only about what happens to us, but how we choose to respond to what happens to us. It means giving voice to our feelings and finding the connection — or gap — between what we believe and how we live our lives.

Priest and author Henri Nouwen describes this as a willingness to tell the truth about the rhythm of both brokenness and renewal in our lives. In Eternal Seasons he writes, “I have always felt that, if you want to talk about hope, you have to talk about despair. If you want to talk about joy, you have to talk about darkness. If you want to speak about salvation, or redemption or freedom, it’s very important that you’re willing to speak about what you’re being redeemed from and what you’re being set free from. The spiritual life is a constant choice to let your negative experiences become an opportunity for conversion or renewal.”

These are the hopeful stories others hunger to hear.

Common Elements of Good Stories All good stories — whether Cinderella, the Prodigal Son in the Bible or the personal experience of climbing Half Dome — have several common elements, including character, conflict and change. If the story is personal, you are the main character. But the character might be a person in the Bible, a historical figure or someone you know.

The conflict is the challenge faced. The greater the tension in the conflict, the more compelling the story. Standing in a store, trying to decide which dress to purchase is not a very compelling conflict — unless that choice represents the way you are dealing with a shopping addiction and the coping skills you’ve recently learned at a recovery group at your church.

Change is the most powerful evidence of God at work in our lives. Change is most often found in the character, not the circumstances. Describing this change is how we give voice to our experiences of knowing God’s love or guidance or hope. His redemption.

“When suffering shatters the carefully kept vase that is our lives, God stoops to pick up the pieces,” writes Ken Gire in The North Face of God. “But he doesn’t put them back together as a restoration project patterned after our former selves. Instead, he sifts through the rubble and selects some of the shards as raw material for another project — a mosaic that tells the story of redemption.”

It’s in this mosaic that our stories emerge, one shard at a time.

And though the shards may be jagged, when they are reassembled by the one who created the universe, they make a compelling story indeed. ■

When Not to Tell Your Story Story is a powerful and effective means of communication. But sometimes you should NOT tell your story:

Finding Our Stories In leadership, we are constantly asked to inform, encourage and connect people around common goals and vision. These questions might help you discover a story relevant to your message as an illustration or way to creatively package the content: How can I illustrate this message with an example out of my life? Another person’s life (with permission, of course)?

What person in the Bible exemplifies this point?

How did I learn this skill (life lesson or reality of God’s promise)?

What am I learning about myself as I face this challenge?

What is my gap between knowing and doing this?

Practicing the use of story means taking the time to mine the memories tucked into our souls.

The result can provide a powerful and sacred experience, for both storyteller and listener.

When you are still too much in the middle of it. A woman wanted to tell her story about growing through an abusive relationship, but tearfully admitted she was now involved in a second abusive relationship. Her emotions were too raw and her story too unfinished — and the decision to wait brought enormous relief.

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Most leaders are used to communicating with teacher/ preacher voices, especially in Christian settings, which can send a listener’s attention straight to her ankles. But when we tell a story, people listen differently.

Skillfully, she wove spiritual truths into this story that turned out to be a description of her faith journey, and I left church that day — not thinking about my shoes or ankles — but motivated to learn more about the summit of my faith: heaven.

I also felt more connected to this woman because of her revealing honesty, which gave me permission to be equally honest regarding my own lack of knowledge and doubts about heaven. I was not alone. Her story triggered great conversations with my husband and friends, not only on the way out of church, but throughout the next week. I remembered her story.

Most leaders are used to communicating with teacher/preacher voices, especially in Christian settings, which can send a listener’s attention straight to her ankles. But when we tell a story, people listen differently. Story has the power to motivate and engage.

Story helps us to know God, ourselves and each other more intimately. The word story actually means “to know.” And we all have an insatiable hunger to know and be known. Surely God breathed that need into our souls at creation so that we would seek to be in close relationship with him and each other.

We see this hunger lived out in our culture today. We are experiential people who want to know how others face challenges, make choices and experience the consequences. That’s why reality TV is so popular. That’s why Oprah plops people down on her couch to tell their bizarre or heart-wrenching stories. It’s what makes us sneak People magazine off the rack at the checkout counter to quickly catch up on the details of some celebrity’s experience.

The power of stories is nothing new. God tells us about himself through stories. In fact, seventy percent of the Bible is made up of stories. Jesus told stories about ordinary things such as shepherds and farmers, lost sheep and a lost son. As postmodern people, we demand communication that is both experiential and authentic.

“Experience is one of the primary languages of postmodern culture,” writes Mark Miller in his book Experiential Storytelling.

“This has vast implications for the Church. Spiritually, it means that people are more open and ready than ever to experience the mystery and awesome power of God.” Stories have the power to make God and faith more real to us.

Intellectually I might know that God desires good to grow out of every difficult circumstance, but that truth becomes more real when I hear a story of someone who survived a painful divorce and discovered she was capable of far more than she ever imagined. The message becomes, “if she can find good in hard things, maybe I can too.”

Stories have power because they motivate us to change. They package life lessons in narratives that are easily remembered.

While many forms of communication tell us what to think, stories allow us to draw our own conclusions. And we are most motivated by what we discover for ourselves.

No wonder stories have gentle power with not-yet-believers.

Regardless of where someone is on a faith journey, a story is non-threatening. It doesn’t ask anything of the listener except to listen. No one can argue the truth of a personal experience. Stories also connect us with each other.

They become windows into each other’s souls.

When it’s not your story to tell.

A mother prepared a story about her son’s struggle with drugs, but realized this was his story and not hers. She was not free to tell it until she could re-organize it through her point of view and response as a mother.

When the story might hurt or embarrass someone else. A young woman wanted to tell the story about her dysfunctional relationship with her mother, but decided she cannot tell the story while her mother is living.

Often this choice can be made by asking: would I let that other person read this story?

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