Everybody’s got a story. What’s yours?
What are your family heirloom stories, the ones you tell your kids about their grandparents and great-grandparents? When you think of yourself in junior high, which story comes to mind? What’s your best college road trip story? Tell the story of meeting your spouse and seeing each of your babies for the first time. What parts of these stories do you love? Or leave out?
Stories are tools to help us distill our epic lives into sound bites we can tell at a party. Stories translate life for us. When God wanted us to understand who He is, He gave us a book of stories about really messed up people and His second chances. Jesus told parables for the same reason. Stories teach.
I’ve learned every important lesson through a story. When I retell myself the story, the hindsight shows me the climax, who the main characters really were, and the conflict I hadn’t realized at the time.
The problem with storytelling is that kids are the most enthusiastic storytellers in the world. And kids are TERRIBLE storytellers.
If this sounds harsh, let me invite you to my minivan after school, where four elementary-school students will tell about their days. At the same time. At the relative noise level of several planes taking off.
Besides the volume, the tortuous part of kids’ stories is their lack of direction. I’m not sure when a person understands a story needs a clear beginning, middle, and ending, but I can tell you it’s sometime in junior high. Storytellers younger than ten begin with a long description of lunch, segue into a memory from last week, and end with frustration about a homework assignment.
Also, they tell these stories extremely slowly. The story about falling down at P.E. could take twenty minutes. The storyteller gets distracted, stops to make sure you’re listening, and pauses for hundreds of “ummmmms.” Listening can be excruciating, not to mention confusing.
Yet, their stories are still important. The girls have to verbally process the drama happening with their friends. The boys have to tell fantasy stories about Jedi wars they’re fighting in their minds. All four kids have to tell the stories of their nightmares and dreams over breakfast. They interrupt each other, forget parts, and make stuff up. It’s like our breakfast-table ritual.
But we’ll keep listening to these novice storytellers. We’ll try to understand, ask questions, and try not to ask them to stop talking. We’ll do all this because they’re learning when they tell these stories. They’re learning who they are, what they value, and what makes people laugh. They’re learning which parts of their day are important and which parts they actually don’t care about.
And, hopefully, they’re learning how to tell better stories.
