God wants us to tell our stories to others, and not just the parts that make us feel good. In fact, God is invested in writing our stories so that the bad parts highlight His goodness and mercy. In other words, the bad parts are the best parts! From Israel recounting the times they were forgiven and restored, to Jesus sending the sinful and the sick back to their communities with deliverance on their lips—our God desires that we take our true stories and give them away to others so that they can see what He’s like and what He can do. 

What is a story? We’re all capable of defining story, but just so we’re all on the same page here, a story, specifically a narrative, is a spoken or written account of connected events. We’ve all heard stories—in books, in movies, or told to us at the end of a school day in excessive, overlapping detail by nine-year-old little girls. But what defines a good story—what elements are necessary to make it interesting, readable, relatable? Well, it needs to consist of a few things: good characters—strong protagonists, complex antagonists, major characters, minor characters. They need to be connected to one another, or at least the story, in some way. There needs to be an overarching theme, a goal, a message that’s being conveyed. And absolutely, there must be a good Storyteller.

There is one Story that outshines all others. It’s actually the Story in which every other story finds its base, its root. It is the Story that defines all stories, because it’s written by the Creator of the universe, and all the other stories are able to be because of this one Story. This Story is made up of more characters than we could count, connected over thousands of years. It contains main plots and subplots. It includes histories of nations, one nation in particular. It’s full of heroic adventures and legendary figures. This Story, an Epic, starts out, “In the beginning, God created…”