Stories are awesome! Stories are my favorite. When I was a kid, I loved reading stories, of any nature. And as I was introduced to the Bible, I found that I really and utterly enjoyed reading the Old Testament–to clarify it was one of those cases that I loved to read the Old Testament over the New Testament. I mean, I liked the stories in the Gospels and stuff, but I didn’t really like much else because it wasn’t story oriented (I have since grown to appreciate the New Testament, and it seems that things have switched).

But I loved reading about Joshua getting tricked into an alliance with local enemies that the LORD had commanded them to destroy (Joshua 9). Or about the various antics and exploits of the kings of Judah and Israel (1 & 2 Kings), or about the man of God who disobeyed God when he was tricked into resting and feasting with a deceitful prophet and not completing a journey commanded by God and so he died and was mauled by a lion (1 Kings 13).

Yeah, these exciting, gruesome, bloody, and outrageous stories enthralled me. They taught me that there was such a thing as righteous and unrighteous men, and that sometimes righteous men do unrighteous things. Yet they also taught me about God and his seemingly ambivalent desire for both Justice and Mercy. These elements that I mentioned are themes at the heart of every story ever conceived: good vs. evil, need for revenge, inspiring redemption, forgiveness, a desire to make things right when they have gone wrong.

Conflict. No story is told without it. Otherwise, the information being told would be just that, uninteresting data flowing out of a mouth (or typed or written out by hand). What makes a story interesting, enjoyable, and memorable is conflict. But if you think about it, we ourselves have tons of stories to share, even if we think otherwise. It all depends on the way we look at things.

We all have our share of conflicts (the glass is have empty), but we also have our share of stories that could be told (the glass is half full). I think that is why people tend to like optimistic people better: they tend to share their stories as exciting struggles they have experiences, whereas pessimists tend to just look at them as conflicts that must be over-come….and that’s it.

I know more often (and by default), I am usually apart of the latter group. But I still know and enjoy stories–reading them, watching them, listening to them, singing to them, experiencing them, etc…. They will never cease to amaze me. I think that Jesus knew what he was doing when he told parables to the people….he captured our attention, and proclaimed hope to us who were and are lost in ways that we could comprehend.