The 'Good Book' Offers Insight Into Our Lives

When I encourage people to write up their life stories, I often face objections. People will humbly say, “I haven’t done anything special,” or “Who would want to read about me?” It seems most people have been acculturated to believe only celebrities and politicians have anything worthwhile to say; sadly, this means regular folks too often let extraordinary everyday experiences slip into the ether we call a forgotten past.

To counter the reluctance of the bashful, I tell people it is our stories that link us to generations past and generations to come and without our stories it’s only a matter of time after death that we’ll be forgotten. Without our stories, our lives will be plugged into a dry column of statistics – date of birth, date of marriage, date of death. That’s not a suitable synopsis for a life.

Still, I face skeptics who don’t think ordinary peoples’ lives make for interesting reading. To these people I share this fact: people read other peoples’ stories in the hope of catching a glimpse of their own stories within the narrative. In other words, people don’t read to learn about other people; they read to learn about themselves.

History has given us extraordinary storytellers, famous for crafting stories about ordinary people — Sophocles, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Toni Morrison, Frederick Buechner are a few of my favorites. All of these writers have spun narrative into gold. The greatest storyteller of all time, though, was Jesus Christ.

Using his signature parable, Jesus wove deep, magnificent tales around the lives and struggles of ordinary people — beggars, widows, lepers and prostitutes to name a few. If you’re an ordinary human, you don’t have to turn too many pages in your bible to recognize your story or a find lesson that is applicable to your life. The bible is great literature; when we read it, we can learn much about ourselves.