I recently enjoyed a two-day, one-night retreat with a dear friend and mentor of mine from college. We played golf twice, shared multiple meals together, and spent meaningful time in our room at the inn praying and reading Scripture. It was so refreshing and so joyous.
I'm realizing that a thing I particularly love about spending time with dear brothers in the faith is telling and hearing stories. We all know that we humans connect more deeply with narratives than with anything else. A good yarn is far richer than a harangue or a lecture or a shopping list.
As believers, our story-telling includes countless times God came through for us, which are wonderful to recount and hear to buoy our faith for future blessing. It also includes Bible stories, which are inspired messages upon which we build our lives and order our thoughts.
At our mini-retreat, my friend and I exchanged yet another kind of story, which is stories about Bible stories. I was asking for his prayer about something in my life, which caused him to think about a particular psalm, which in turn reminded me of the summer I spent in Eastern Europe where I read a psalm a day and was sustained through the myriad emotions and heartfelt expressions contained in the Psalms.
The next morning, it was my turn to share a psalm that came to my mind, to continue with theme of psalms. And the particular psalm I read in turn called to mind for him the time that very psalm was uttered at a particularly poignant moment in his congregation.
To walk in faith, in community, is to experience layers upon layers of stories: stories of our own encounters with the divine, stories we read in the Bible, and stories of times Bible stories connected to our stories. What a wonderful thing to behold!
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