"If I gave you a nickel for all the stupid stories you've told"

The above title to this entry is a quote that one of my college roommates said directly to another college roommate of mine as we travelled to Tennessee for a random weekend trip while studying at the Institute (Moody Bible). We were just two months into meeting eachother when we decided to help one of of our sisters (we had brother/sister floors at Moody) visit her fiance in Tennessee. Now, as all of us are married and living in different parts of the country, we look back to this very trip as a forging experience in our friendship. This quote can always get us laughing and reminiscing of the great, amazing, crazy, and quite frankly, stupid things that we all did together. But as we would always crack jokes at Biggity for his what seemed like endless stories all the time, I got to thinking last night as I was reading a chapter of 'The Magnificent Defeat' by Frederick Buechner, that stories are an essential part of our lives, especially as Christians, or should I say, Christ followers/ hopeful imitators. So even though B had a story for everything, maybe he was on to something very profound, or maybe he just loved saying "I won't go into detail" and then proceed to tell a pointless story in grave, endless detail!! Ahh I love this guy. Now I am rambling...back to the point of this entry.

I was struck last night at the content of Buechners writing in his chapter entitled "Annunciation". He writes, "I would like to start out by reminding my reader that in essence this is what Christianity is. If we whittle away long enough, it is a story that we come to at last. And if we take even the fanciest and most metaphysical kind of theologian or preacher and keep on questioning him far enough--Why is this so? All right, but why is that so? Yes, but how do we know that it's so?--even he is forced finally to take off his spectacles and push his books off to one side and say, "Once upon a time there was.....", and then everybody leans forward a little and starts to listen." Buechner goes on to say, "Every storyteller, whether he is Shakespeare telling about Hamlet or Luke telling about Mary, looks out at the world much as you and I look out at it and sees things happening--people being born, growing up, working, loving, getting old, and finally dying--only then, by the very process of taking certain of these events and turning them into a story, giving them form and direction, does he make a sort of claim about events in general, about the nature of life itself. And the storyteller's claim, I believe, is that life has meaning......there is order and purpose deepdown behind them or inside them and that they are leading us not just anywhere but somewhere. The power of stories is that they are telling us that life adds up somehow, that life itself is like a story...................The story that Christianity tells is an extraordinary tale that tells of the love of between God and man, love conquered and love conquering, of long-lost love and love that sometimes looks like hate. And so, in one sense, the story Christianity tells is one that can be so simply told that we can get the whole thing really on a very small Christmas card or into the two crossed pieces of wood that form its symbol, and in another sense it is so vast and complex that the whole Bible can only hint at it."

As I finished reading the chapter and slept on it for a night and have gone through this whole day thinking on the Story, I have been left in humbled amazement that in some way, through His matchless grace, God has chosen me to play apart in the story of His redeeming love. What grace, what mercy!!!

In light of this, I hope that people will one day say of me.."if I gave you a nickel for all the times you've shared the story of Christ's redeeming love...." May it be so.