My daughters have recently added something to our bedtime routine. Every night that I’m home, after we read our Bible story and say our prayers and when we’re settling down to go to sleep, one of them will whisper, “Daddy, tell us a story about when you were a little boy.”
We love stories as human beings. There’s something about a story that grabs our attention, it makes us perk up and listen. Stories fit into our lives in a way that instructions or poetry cannot.
Smart people have come up with a simple way of understanding a good story. Bernadette Jiwa tells us that a story can be understood as four things: a character, some circumstances, a choice, and a change.
God’s story with us is Him as the character – a mysterious powerful Being who is filled with love. The circumstances arise as He creates the world. and it subsequently falls into chaos and sin. His choice? Start over or find a way to redeem His creation. He chooses redemption, and it changes not only the world, but it results in a change for Him.
God doesn’t change His character, mind you, but He changes precisely because His character doesn’t change. He changes in that He finds a way to join His creation, and join His creation to Himself eternally. That change is to send His Son as a sacrifice that will reorder the chaos that we brought and continue to bring into His world. That change eventually brings a change to our eternal story, making it a happy ending instead of a tragedy.
When my daughters ask for a story at night, sometimes I’ve found that I can tell the same story over and over and get better at telling it. Perhaps we too can spend sometime telling and retelling the story of God, and maybe we could even get so good at it that someone might want to listen.