The task of the storyteller

I told a story in church one Sunday. It was not just my story; it was a shared story from my family that had only been told quietly for a long time. Maybe it was a confession. After telling it I felt spent, as if something powerful had moved through me.

To be a storyteller is like having an electric current move through your body. The story comes from somewhere—maybe you lived it, or maybe someone passed it to you—and it comes into your body and you ponder it in your heart for awhile, like Mary did. And then one day, you tell it. Not just for yourself, but for everyone who has a role in it. And the telling has its own power, and the electric current moves through you and on to the hearer, and you as the story teller are changed, and the one who hears the story is changed, and even the story itself changes.

This is what it means to proclaim the good news, to be a Christian witness, to testify to the stories that have changed us.