Tell me the old, old story...

I grew up spending time on front porches surrounded by story telling adults. “Little pitchers have big ears” was one of my Grandma’s sayings and in my case, that was certainly true. Grandma told stories about her opera singer mother and her visions of the dead. Uncle Harold told stories about Granny Grunt who stole little children, snatched them up under her apron and whisked them away from their home. Daddy told stories about the practical jokes he and the other men played on each other at the paper mill where he worked to support our family and his farm habit. One day Daddy went to pick up his tool box and someone had screwed it to the floor. Story telling, like joke telling, was an art form, highly individual, practiced until the stories became little jewels. Even though you might know what was coming when a story was repeated, it never failed to charm and delight you in the telling.
I am reading a lovely book by Gail Godwin titled “Evensong”. It tells the story of an Episcopal woman priest, her husband, and their various families. One night she is called out to the hospital to be with a woman, a tourist, whose husband has died. She sits with her until the local undertaker comes and then gives the woman a ride back to the inn where they were staying. As they ride, Helen tells some of her story to Margaret, the priest. Helen says she feels lost from God now. Standing next to her husband in church or in life, his faith provided a safe place for her, a God umbrella, and now it was gone. Much to her surprise, Margaret finds herself telling the story of her losses... a miscarriage and a mother who left her when she was six. And then Helen asks a question... “Where do you find God in this?” Margaret replies that in the telling of their stories, she feels changed, names the changes and says she feels God in that process.
In my childhood church we sang “I Love to Tell the Story” (A flat major) and “Tell Me the Old, Old Story” (C major) frequently. We were taught how to tell our faith stories, give our testimony, and exhorted to do so with friends and strangers. As a new Christian at the ripe old age of twelve, I practiced witnessing (telling how I was saved) until I made a pest of myself. Thank God my friends were long suffering and my family was patient.
The Bible is God’s story told by human beings who lived their lives losing and finding their way back to God. I love the stories about those characters... all of them far from perfect, who laughed and loved and sinned and repented, eventually (or not) getting the punchline of the joke or the moral of the story. One of the reasons I love Jesus is the stories he told filled with people I recognized in my own life. Our little church had a Mary Magdalen, a Prodigal Son, a Good Samaritan and we all knew who they were. Those were and still are true stories in every sense of the word.
Writing is for me another way to tell my story, my story and God’s story. I work out my own salvation in the telling and hear from you sometimes pieces of your own stories in response. Margaret was right. We stand on holy ground when we tell our stories to each other and resurrection comes calling in unexpected ways. We all stand under someone else’s God umbrella and stories help us recognize the arms of God in the persons sitting next to us on the front porches of our lives.
Dear One, I never tire of hearing the stories told by your children. They keep me laughing and weeping and learning.Thank you for this most amazing gift of life and love and loss. I am grateful for all the stories I hear and all the stories I tell but most of all, I am grateful for your presence in my life. May it always be so. Amen.