Stories.

“Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named." - Madeleine L' Engle

In my living room are two small side tables. They are solid wood, dark with both a rich stain and age. Each is one half of a circle, and they can be pushed together or used apart. They once belonged to my great-grandparents - who I knew only as Papa and Grandma - and though I have no memory of the tables in their old farmhouse outside Adamsville, Tennessee, it isn’t hard to imagine them among the other things in that house I do remember: an upright piano where Papa would ask his granddaughter, my mom, to play, and my sister and me to sing along, from an old hymnbook, or a crowded kitchen counter top where I could almost always spy an open bag of orange candy, the soft kind, sugared all over.

It’s funny but the hymn lyrics “I’ve got a mansion, just over the hilltop,” never make me think of a mansion at all, but instead that old farmhouse, Papa’s grapevines and watermelon and bean patches surrounding it, and sometimes a stray kitty to be found in the ancient barn across the road.

The tables are far older than me, and are maybe even a little out of place here in 2025. But I love them - partly because I love pretty things and they are beautifully crafted, but mostly because they remind me that I am part of a story much bigger than myself, that I come from stories not my own, but that help form my own.

***

A dear friend is living with terminal illness. I say “living” intentionally, because he is still doing life, even as he faces the awful truth that his will be cut short. I am angry about this. Sadder for him and his beautiful family than I know how to fully express. Turns out there are some things, after all, that defy language.

I’ve known him almost three quarters of my life, and the memories run together the way the golds and pinks of a perfect sunset do. We could tell stories for hours - some of them my own, some not, but all of them part of who I am, who I continue to become.

***

My daughter is studying acting in college - she is, in her own right, already a fine artist. She loves the stage, to be sure, but she loves it because on it she has learned how to tell stories - stories that matter, stories that shape thoughts and ideas and even memory. Her own story, even at her young age, fuels her storytelling and helps her tell stories that are not hers, but that become part of who she is, a character or a plot line nestling into her being and taking root.

Another dear friend often says that there are no new stories, only new people living them, and if this is true, and I believe that it is, then what my daughter does when she takes on a character is remind us that whatever thing it is that we’re facing - it has been faced before, been lived in a lifetime before ours. There’s an odd sort of comfort in this, a reminder that we do not move or live or having being in a vacuum, but among all that has been and all that will be.

***

We have our demons, y’all. We have our heartaches that threaten to undo us. We have starting over. We have walking through darkness and somehow finding light on the other side. We have joys - great and small and fleeting and forever. We have pain, the kind that we cannot imagine getting through and we have healing, the kind we never imagined possible. And this is why I will always believe that telling stories - about people and things and places and moments - matters. Even and perhaps especially the stories that name our brokenness, our grief, because there is something about those that remind us how much we all have in common, and this is, I think, where hope is found.

I’m terrified, y’all, of these days we are living - so much seems unsure. So much seems tilted irretrievably towards violence and othering and chaos. So much seems caught up in the hands of greed and lust and hate. Lives are being destroyed and entire ways of being demolished - all in the name of power, of naming the lives of some human beings more worthy than others. This is a lie, of course, and it always has been.

Stories - of faith and of history - tell us that this is not the way.

Stories - of our heroes - tell us that there is a better way.

What has been tells us what could be.

And what could be is exactly what my faith tells me that God created us for in the first place - each other, all of us, walking each other through this life, and all its impossible heartbreak and beauty, and then home.