What is Your Story? (S1E4 Encore)

We, uh, are born storytellers, even if we can't at first use words.

We like to say that every baby comes into the world looking for someone, looking for him, looking for her, and they first let us know this with screams and wails, and of course, so do little kittens and little dogs let their moms and dads know that they need them.

And in some respects, it's using a language that is pre-verbal, right? That's what our newborns and our infants are doing.

And then, you know, they find that first word and their second and third word, and they finally put those words together in a sentence, and then they're off to the races.

And we as human beings, uh, tell stories because we're wired to do that.

We don't just wander aimlessly through the world.

You don't really have to teach a two or three-year-old who's beginning to acquire language to tell you things.

They Want to tell you things.

Now, we can find ways to discourage them from doing that.

We can find ways to beat it out of them.

We can find ways to get them to shut up and shame them from telling stories that they wanna tell us.

But when children are flourishing, they are simply master storytellers, and of course, sometimes, you know, they tell us stories that we're really tired of.

Like, we- these- I, I don't need to hear about this for the 10th time that you've just shared with me nine times.

But we are these storytellers, and this is how we navigate our life.

And the, the, what's really beautiful for us, particularly as followers of Jesus, is that because we're storytellers and we develop this from the time we're little and we emerge, and we're gonna talk about this later, we emerge as these storytellers.

There are some things that storytelling in general have, you know, that stor- that storytelling has in common, that, that there's some characteristics of that.

But one of the big questions then that we are faced with all the time is the question: In what story do we believe we're living? In what story do we believe we're living? Because we live as if we do believe we're in some story because we keep telling people stories.

Your dad, your dad was telling a story when he said, "Newman."

[laughs]

Right?

A one-word story.

When he said that, right, he's, he's telling the...

He's assuming that his audience, you and Nell in the car, he's assuming that his audience is familiar with the story, with... is familiar with Seinfeld.

Right.

Is familiar with the character Newman, but is also familiar with this whole notion that Newman is a guy that we love to hate, kind of.