By Kelly Carr 

“Hey, Kaelyn, look out the window at that cool bird flying over there. . . . Kaelyn, did you hear me? Kaelyn!”

I turned around from the front seat of the car to figure out why my 9-year-old was ignoring me on our drive back from our family road trip. There she was, her nose stuck in a book, tuning out the rest of the world. 

I couldn’t have been more proud!

Capturing Attention

My husband and I love stories in various forms—I read novels, he digs into history, and we both enjoy movies where the storyline is top notch. We have tried passing along that love to our daughter. We show her classic movies. (For my husband, that meant exposing her to the original Star Wars trilogy.) We share our favorite books. (For me, that was reading her The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.) And we tell her about people in history, especially those from the Bible. 

So to see my daughter caught up in a story of her own choosing and becoming oblivious to everything else—well, that just made me smile. 

What stories capture your attention and have you zeroed in, ignoring sights, sounds, or natural disasters? 

I’m not just interested in stories from books or movies. I also love hearing stories told in person. When people are excited about something, I can hear it in the stories they tell on that topic. If you have a hobby, I’ll be fascinated to hear how it fascinates you.

I always say that my neighbor Kristen tells the best stories. I can’t tell if everything crazy that could possibly happen has happened to her—or maybe she just makes every experience into a fabulous story, but when she describes something, all of us around her are all ears.

Helping Stories Meet

Telling stories is such a basic concept, but how powerful it is. We connect to one another and to new ideas when things are framed in a plot (real or fiction) with a beginning, middle, and end. Perhaps that’s why the Bible is full of all types of stories. God knows how they can weave their way into our hearts. 

I enjoy finding out the story of how people first encounter God. And I appreciate hearing others share how they’ve grasped a new aspect of God on a deeper level. Because when God’s eternal story intersects with other people’s stories—well, that’s the point of it all, isn’t it? Our job as Christians is to make sure those stories meet. 

You may not be great with words. That’s no problem. You can still connect people to God’s story every day through your actions. Because your story and my story is God’s story. We are all a part of his creation. So when you share a piece of your life with others, you are pointing them to the author of life. 

The narrative of who you are is valuable to more people than you might realize. You are a living testimony. So what story are you telling?