We hear a lot about stories and sometimes about the art of storytelling. That could very well be because it has been around since people populated the earth and developed language. Long before we read stories in books or even parchments using words in whatever language was ours, stories appeared as drawings or pictures found in caves in nearly every part of the world. They come to us now in every known medium and circle the globe nearly at the speed of light.

Stories help us make sense out of the world and classify the patterns of thought and experience into forms we can share with others while also helping us better understand ourselves. And stories are one of the things that seem to be loved by every human in every culture down through time. The stories we love most become ones that we recall long past the time we first heard or read them and our choices of them say a lot about us.

“The stories we choose to spend our lives with are a reflection of our values, and, therefore, our character.”

Wayne Booth

I once would have believed that each of us have memories of sitting on someone’s lap or beside them hearing a story when we were very young, but I discovered that was not true when I was still working as a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor. As a lover of stories, I found that some who came to my office were helped by reading a story because of how the author chose words to give a glimpse of insight or understanding that was more effective than a simple explanation. I loved reading to our children and the children in my classroom when I was a teacher, so it was a natural tool to use in my office. But I could never have guessed a person well into adulthood often shared they had never had anyone read them a story.

Our language grows as we listen to stories and so does our awareness of the world we are born into and the possible place we have in it. The stories we hear fuel our imagination of other places and things and stir up dreams as well as adventures we want to chart. They give us a connection with the person reading it by the physical closeness to them as well as the inflection and expression they use as they read. Stories also seem to be stitched into our memories differently than words we hear in other ways. Even when we are older, many of us can recall a story we read or were told in our childhood.

Discovering that some who heard me read a portion of a story had never had that experience reinforced my desire to use that tool often. One of the favorites was You Are Special by Max Lucado, but there were others or portions of them also – The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams and The Ugly Duckling by Hans Christian Andersen among them.

The adults I read to did not feel as though I was treating them as children but enjoyed experiencing the story and the connection it created for them that had sometimes been absent in their own childhood experience.

Stories are powerful tools.

Jesus knew well the power of stories and anyone who has ever had even a small exposure to the Bible has heard a few of the stories that He told. But even his disciples were curious about why He told stories and in Matthew 13 we see the exchange between Him and them as they ask Him directly why He uses stories. His answer?

“You’ve been given insight into God’s kingdom. You know how it works. Not everybody has this gift, this insight; it hasn’t been given to them. Whenever someone has a ready heart for this, the insights and understandings flow freely. But if there is no readiness, any trace of receptivity soon disappears. That’s why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward a welcome awakening.”

Matthew 13:11-13 (MSG)

His answer causes me to think that the stories not only stay in memories, but they can be used to plow up the ground of the person’s heart and mind to be able to receive the truth of the story and grow to gain insight into its meanings.

Perhaps that is also why we might be more likely to recall an illustration in a sermon on Sunday morning more than the specific points or scripture references that were used.

Stories are indeed powerful, and it reminds us of how vital it is to expose our children and ourselves to the very best stories because they will not only be remembered for a lifetime but also because they will help to shape the hearer’s view and understanding of themselves and the world they live in.

Stories can be used for great good beyond educating us but evil can also use them to mislead and deceive us, to persuade us to accept something we would not otherwise choose.

“We will be defined, as individuals and as a society, by the stories we choose to live and by those we value enough to pass on to the next generation. This is perhaps our ultimate responsibility as characters acting freely.  What stories will we tell our children and why?  What stories will they choose to tell in turn?”

Daniel Taylor in Tell Me A Story

We know well the cycles of day and night, but did we notice the darkening of another kind as it gradually began to build around the world? Were we too caught up in our own things to see when the shadows began to deepen? Is that why many are shocked at how dark it has become now and wondering how it could come to this? Have we forgotten that long before the thunderclaps above our heads and lightning hits the tree beside our house that at a distance you can see the small clouds of the storm forming?

Did we lose sight of evil or deny it exists because things were going along decently enough in our lives or did we see and ignore what was happening and think it would never affect us? These are not unusual in our current world. Lines of good and evil, right, and wrong have blurred in recent decades. That didn’t happen all at once either. Looking at what we watched on TV 50 years ago or less shows how things began to shift and we accepted the shift without realizing how far the rabbit hole might take us.

Popular TV shows of the 60’s in the United States included The Andy Griffith Show, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Dick VanDyke Show, The Real McCoys, Leave it to Beaver, and Hogan’s Heroes to name a few. Language was clean enough for children to watch and what was good, and right was highlighted and what was not was shown to be bad. By the time we entered the 70’s The Walton’s were playing on many TV sets and we all can still recall the way each show ended with family members saying goodnight to one another. Other popular shows were things like Happy Days, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, and The Carol Burnett Show, but we were also beginning to explore deeper things with the series entitled Roots. Language was still decent, but here and there things began to creep in.

By the 80’s some sultry things began to be more popular like The Thorn Birds series, Dynasty, Hill Street Blues, Mama’s Family, Three’s Company, Dallas, Fantasy Island, and The Golden Girls to name a few. We loved most of them but there were bedroom scenes, colorful jokes, and crude comments we would not have heard a decade or two before. We didn’t think much of it at the time, and we began to see it as normal without much thought of whether it would affect us or our children.

By the 2000’s we were watching things like The Sopranos, Desperate Housewives, Sex in the City, Psych, Gossip Girl, Law and Order, and ER. Not all of us watched these, but the family fare of the 60’s and 70’s was disappearing, sex was no longer taboo as a theme or topic, costuming included a shift toward less modesty and language was shifting as well.

A decade later in the 2010’s we were seeing Parenthood, The Good Wife, Orange is the New Black, Hannibal, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones as examples. By then some of us were tuning out, but still hooked on the TV to unwind at the end of the day and it nudged us to tune in here and there.

But at the same time, we were accommodating to the shift in themes and formats on TV. Other shifts in music, movies, books, and entertainment of all types were shifting as well. Little by little what was good versus evil, dark versus light was less the theme or value presented. Culture and all of us were changing, being led along a path without much thought.

Then I read something in Matthew Kelly’s book, Life is Messy, that put it all in perspective:

“What is evil? Evil is defined as profoundly immoral. The definition itself holds the reason for the escalating evil in our world, though it may not be obvious at first. It all hinges on the word immoral.

The word immoral presents an intricate problem for our culture. Morality is almost never mentioned. I cannot recall the last time I heard the mainstream media describe something as immoral. Every type of perversion and depravity has become someone’s personal preference or right.

When we pretend that there is no such thing as right and wrong, good and bad, this will inevitably lead to the proliferation of evil. And it has.”

Matthew Kelly in Life is Messy

Not unlike the story of the frog in the kettle who jumped in when the water was cool and didn’t notice the increasing temperature of the fire under the kettle until it was too late, we have been desensitized to evil and become increasingly ambivalent while we have moved to more and more value-free living and choices. As we have done so, the storm clouds have darkened and begun to influence more and more aspects of our world without us paying much heed to it or whether we contributed to it with our own messy lives and choices along the way. It wasn’t our plan, and it didn’t happen with the same influences in every culture or society around the globe and yet it happened nonetheless, and we now see the world reeling from one thing or another.

It could be easy to despair, but we may also have forgotten that scripture told us to be aware of and pay attention to the signs of the times and what they would tell us about the path we were on. Those words should cause us to take heed, repent and deal with our own messiness, and hope for the only One who can bring light and freedom from evil. But Matthew Kelly’s words remind us that evil is much closer than any of us suspect. That is why it can seem to sneak up on us.

“Every age has new storytellers, but one truth endures: We become the stories we read, hear, and watch. Today’s storytellers appear to be committed to normalization of evil, and by extension the annihilation of human dignity. Not the dignity of some anonymous people, but the annihilation of your dignity, my dignity, and the dignity of our spouses, children, grandchildren, friends, colleagues, and neighbors. Evil is much closer than we suspect.”

Matthew Kelly in Life is Messy

Let each of us choose to be a different kind of storyteller so that those who listen, read, watch, and hear us will not accept a normalization of evil and immorality while that is still possible in the midst of the deepening storm clouds.

If you are one of those people who try to prepare for whatever the next day’s schedule holds or the next week, you are likely a planner. Even if that is not you, you have likely had hopes and dreams of or for certain things in your life. We all have some of these qualities even if they vary by degree. But as we go along doing the best we can, we may well express, “But I thought…” The statement refers to an expectation that has not been realized and that happens at times despite our best efforts.

Things like this can be small such as a day we need to get a list of things accomplished for work, at home, or in some area of our life. We try to schedule to make sure we can succeed in the goal, but the car breaks down, the Internet goes offline, we or someone whom we love gets sick and we need to handle that instead of the list of things in the plan.

Maybe we decide we really need to address the debt we acquired. We get help to set up a budget and feel good about starting to whittle away at the bills that stack up. We may even have an emergency line in the budget for something unexpected, but the routine service on our car reveals a major repair is needed that exceeds what the budget allows, and we feel discouraged that our efforts are thwarted.

Perhaps we have determined to do a better job with taking care of our health. We’re on track with healthier eating habits and start exercising regularly and setting a sleep schedule – even drinking more water. We keep our regular doctor checkups and feel good and then blood work comes back that says all of that was not enough somehow or the doctor discovers something lurking inside of our body we did not know was there. We feel disheartened and anxious when we worked so hard to be and stay healthy and now our body seems to have betrayed us. We followed the best health professional’s advice and some disease or ailment caught us anyway. Sometimes we are tempted to wonder what the point of the whole effort is when we don’t get the payoff we expected for our hard work as well as the expense of time and money to be as healthy as possible.

Many of us (even with these things) felt grateful we live in a time in history when the medical and scientific advances allow us to enjoy freedom from the scourge of mysterious epidemics that destroy thousands of people but then a pandemic shows us and hangs on with a tenacity we could not have imagined. Or we live in a neighborhood that has given us a sense of safety until crime surges and even our neighborhood gets hit with things we have not seen before. We see danger in places we did not expect to see it and the world feels less safe.

Reading Psalms (especially in The Message rendering) reminds us this is not unique to any one of us or all of us, but is common to humankind and life on this earth. Somehow we missed the clear constant reality that life is full of many unpacked twists and turns. If we are younger, we might be more surprised. We might believe those things happen to “other people” or “older people.” If we are older, we are likely to be less surprised and yet get caught with something that upends us.

Most of us have been living with more uncertainty as a result of how the world seems to be spinning out of control in so many ways and areas. More than the pandemic has happened to us and tempts us to anxiety, restless nights, and discouragement.

Matthew Kelly has some reminders for us all in his newest release, Life is Messy:

“We all end up living unexpected lives.

Life doesn’t unfold according to our plans. But sooner or later, we each have to decide how we are going to make the most of our one brief, unexpected life. It is then that we come face-to-face with two enduring truths: We cannot live without hope that things will change for the better, and we are not victims of our circumstances.

Hope is not always as accessible as we would like. It often seems just out of reach at those times when we are most in need of it, when our hearts are broken, our minds downtrodden, and our souls crushed. Yet, even in those moments, we have a choice. The unexpected is either a curse or an opportunity. We get to decide.”

Matthew Kelly in Life is Messy

And decide we must. The One who created us gave us choice in how we respond to what comes our way.