I’ve always loved stories. As the youngest kid in our family, it was my older sisters who would often read to me at night. I remember in particular a book about a dog who wanted to be hatched, like the chicks that he sees in the farm yard, the ones that his farm owner is now fawning over. He convinces his friends, both Otter and Beaver, to help him build an egg that’s made outta mud and sticks, and they painted in bright pink all around him. He wanted to pop out of that egg. I could never remember the name of that story, but the vivid images have stayed with me for the past 50 years. Just this past week, thanks to the power of the interwebs, I found that book. “How Fletcher was Hatched,” it’s called, by Wende and Harry Devlin. And so I ordered a vintage copy of it. Because stories have the power to change us. That is the power of words. They can get into us, they tumble around inside of us and make us both think about things from a different perspective and even help us to change our behavior.

When it comes to Zimzum Discipleship, to intentionally make space in our lives for our relationships with God and others and the natural world, stories and words matter a great deal. As Christians, we stake our lives on the one who is known as the word made flesh, and so the words of scriptures, the stories of our faith found in the Bible, they have the power to shape us, to transform us and to help us live more faithfully as disciples of Jesus if we allow them to get into us.

Pastor Eugene Peterson talks about this in his book titled “Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading.” He highlights many things that we often read and they’re either to inform us or maybe expand our knowledge or solidify our beliefs, or even provide us with entertainment. However, he suggests something different for scripture. He writes, “Christians feed on scripture. Holy scripture nurtures the holy community as food nurtures the human body. Christians don’t simply learn or study or use scripture. We assimilate it. We take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cold cups of water, missions into all of the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus’ name, hands raised in adoration of the one who we worship, feet washed in company with the Son.”

The trouble is, is that we often come to the Word of God like it’s a beach read. If we pick it up at all, we’re rushing through it, jumping past the boring parts, hoping for a tantalizing ending where the good guys win. And that gets compounded, I think, since we think we know what the Bible has to say already. And so we don’t really read it closely if we read it at all. The parable of the Good Samaritan, that’s the call to help others. “What have you got next, Jesus?” But when we rush through the biblical narrative, we miss out on what it might be saying to us.

Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine highlights this in her book, “Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi.” She writes this about Jesus’ parables: “When we seek universal morals from a genre that is designed to surprise, challenge, shake up or indict and look for a single meaning in a form that opens to us multiple interpretations, we are necessarily limiting the parables and so ourselves. We might be better off,” she says, “thinking less about what parables mean and more about what they can do to remind, provoke, refine, confront, and disturb.” That parable of the Good Samaritan, Dr. Levine imagines retellings in the current day where there is conflict and then asks, “Can we agree to acknowledge the humanity and the potential to do good in the enemy rather than to choose death?” She asks, “Will we be able to care for our enemies who are also our neighbors? Will we be able to bind up their wounds rather than blow up their cities? And can we imagine that they might do the same for us?” That’s a reading of scripture that can impact us and get inside of us, causing us to pause and maybe change course.

Which is, I firmly believe, the reason we choose to be followers of Jesus in the first place, because we want to become more fully the person that Jesus has called us to be. We wanna find forgiveness for the ways in which we’ve made it all about ourselves and our own egos in order that we might find healing and restoration and a new way of life.

Author Donald Miller connects this idea of a new way of life with the power of story. In his book, “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years,” he describes how if you watched a movie about someone who really just wanted to buy a Volvo and then worked in a boring career for years and years to get it, that you probably wouldn’t well up with tears at the end of that movie when that person drove off the lot and tested out the windshield wipers. You’d be thinking that you wanted your money back for such a lousy story. “However,” Don says, “that’s how many of us live our lives.” He suggests that we can’t expect our lives to be meaningful if we don’t try to live into a better story. And what makes this a great film or novel is what can also make a great life. Distilled to its most basic level, a story is about a character that wants something and overcomes a conflict to get it. Don then describes in this book a friend whose teenage daughter was running with the wrong crowd. The father, he helped turn his whole family around by committing to build an orphanage in Latin America. After he had heard about this idea of trying to live a better story. He took a risk. They didn’t have much money to their name, nor did they have the time to even do this, but they made a commitment and they followed through. Wasn’t easy, but it was life-changing. Just like those holy words for scripture can be for us if we allow them to get deep into our souls. If we, as that familiar collect puts it, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the words of scripture.

And one way we can do this is through the spiritual practice of lectio divina, which is simply divine reading. Historically, there are four steps to lectio divina: reading the text, meditating the text, praying the text, and then contemplatively living it. As Guigo II, a monk in the 12th century, beautifully describes it, “Reading puts the solid food into our mouth. Meditation is when we chew it and break it down. Prayer obtains the flavor of it. And contemplative living is the sweetness which makes us glad and refreshes us.” So to practice lectio divina, we quietly prepare ourselves for just a moment or two, asking the Spirit for guidance. We then, either alone or with others, slowly read aloud a short passage of scripture, maybe eight to 10 verses or so. And see what we notice. Just sit for a time and notice where your heart takes you. This leads us to meditation, either a word or phrase that has caught us, or perhaps imagining ourselves in the story as a bystander or in one of the roles. Again, allow this stage of ruminating and chewing on the text to take more time and see where the Spirit moves you. And then pray the text. You might want to read it out again slowly as your prayer or perhaps pray over that phrase or word that you’ve noticed or perhaps to just sit quietly to see what bubbles up. And then finally, as a result of all of this, spend a little time considering what impact this passage might have on your life. This whole process will take about 15 or 20 minutes when done with deliberateness and intentionality. And it has the potential to lead to transformation, to living a better story.

I hope that we all will take time to establish a regular rhythm of lectio divino over the next couple of months, that we will ingest the holy food of scripture and allow it to shape and form us, that we might truly seek to live a better story as a subplot of God’s grand story for all of us, and in so doing become more fully disciples of Jesus who follow Him on his way. Until next time, may God’s blessing be on you and those you love. Be well.