Ah, a man after my own heart: Darryl Tippens’ 15th chp is about “Reading and Storytelling.” My father was a story teller — and still is. For years I avoided telling stories to my students because I thought I was wasting time and would not cover as much. Recently a student told me that she liked my stories. Listen to this opener from Tippens:
“An abundant and growing body of evidence shows that stories have a unique capacity to transmit values, shape identity, move people to action, and preserve memory” (175). Thus, “people who care about the next generation will be experts at telling the community’s story” (175).

Time to stop and ask this question: Are we telling our community’s story to the next generation?
How can we read the Bible to enter into its story so that its story becomes our story and the story of our community? Darryl suggests we need to read the Bible with humility, openness, personal investment and passion, and with a prayerful, meditative approach (lectio divina). So that the Bible is not only a word from God but our word back to God.
George Steiner: “To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial” (180).
“God grants the gift of scriptural memory to the pilgrim heart” (183).
Is one of the reasons we don’t enter into the depth of Jesus’ and Paul’s theology because we don’t thoroughly know the story they were carrying forward?