Embracing the Right Story
Everyone Has One. What’s Yours?
“To be human is to embrace some such basic story through which we understand our world and chart our course through it.” -Craig Bartholomew and Michael Goheen in The Drama of Scripture1
Internalizing the Story
Do we have time for a story? That’s the question my daughter asks me almost every night, just before I turn her lights off and tuck her in for bed. Her favorite books tend to be about things like lost puppies, princesses, and the tender love that a mother raccoon has for her son, Chester. She and I have read the same stories so many times that by now, she can basically “read” them, even though she’s really just reciting the words from memory. Pretty impressive for a four-year-old, isn't it?
She has internalized those stories so thoroughly that they’ve become second nature to her.
Chances are, you have internalized some kind of story, too. Except your story probably doesn’t involve pigs in pajamas or dragons that love tacos. Your story is more fundamental than that. The story that you have internalized is the one that helps you make sense of who you are, where you belong, and why you exist. In that light, it speaks to your identity, your belonging, and your purpose — the big picture questions we all wrestle with.
Everyone has a Story.
Christian authors Craig Bartholomew and Michael Goheen argue that all of us have that kind of basic, fundamental story playing out in our minds that serves as the foundation of our lives. In their book, The Drama of Scripture, they describe it like this:
“In order to understand our world, to make sense of our lives, and to make our most important decisions about how we ought to be living, we depend upon some story. Which story a person lives out of makes a huge difference in how one interprets events in life.”
Another word for this is our worldview, or the lens we use to view and interpret the people, events, and circumstances of our lives. And the lens we use, the worldview we adopt, or the story that drives our narrative has an immense impact on our lives.
In other words, everyone has some basic, grand narrative they are thinking about and using as a way of understanding their lives and planning what happens next. For Bartholomew and Goheen, this is a universal part of our human experience — and each person can only have one fundamental story.
Worldly Narratives
Here are a few examples of the types of big-picture stories that people tend to adopt:
The American Dream — Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Life is about working hard, getting ahead, and seizing the day in order to become more prosperous and successful.
The Hero’s Journey — Stories like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and the Hunger Games illustrate the “Hero’s Journey.” This involves an unlikely hero being thrust into an epic struggle between good and evil, a journey that involves overcoming obstacles, relying on friends, and often a near-death experience that ultimately ends in victory.
Our Personal Stories — The scripts and stories we inherit from our families of origin. These stories might involve poverty, failure, addiction, or the feeling that no matter how hard a person works to do right by others, life still doesn’t go their way.
All of these stories help us make sense of the world around us. They help us understand who we are, why things are happening, and what comes next. But these are not the stories available to us. Despite how popular these narratives are in our society, in the entertainment industry, and in our personal families, there is an even better story available to us — the story of the Bible.
As Bartholomew and Goheen rightfully point out, “Biblical Christianity claims that the Bible alone tells the true story of our world,” and “it functions as the authoritative Word of God for us when it becomes the one basic story through which we understand our own experience and thought, and the foundation upon which we base our decisions and our actions.”
Can you imagine what it would be like for all of us to adopt the grand narrative of the Bible as the foundational story of our lives? If we learned to view our world through the lens of Scripture — creation, sin, and redemption — rather than through the lens of worldly success, power, and pleasure?
What would it take for us to start living out of that story — the story of the Bible?
Finding Our Place in God’s Ultimate Story
First, we would need to internalize the story of the Bible. We would need to understand how each part was joined together as one grand narrative. It wouldn’t suffice for us to simply read God’s Word as a disjointed list of “dos and don’ts”. We would need to see how the Bible was actually a unified story that leads to Jesus, and how God is inviting us to know that story so we can join our story to his.
The Bible is a lot of things. And by that, I mean it has a lot of genres. History, poetry, law, prophecy, ethics, parables, letters, and whatever Revelation is. It has it all. And yet all of it really is united together as a single story about God, his people, and our need for a savior.
And God is inviting us to adopt his story as the foundational story of our lives, the thing that helps us understand who we are, where we fit, and why we’re here.
What Comes Next
Over the course of this summer, I will be guiding us on a journey through the Bible, emphasizing the big-picture story that unfolds from Genesis to Revelation. My hope is that we will all come to adopt God’s story as our story, and to use the grand narrative of Scripture as the foundational story of our lives.
And we’ll begin that journey in a rather unconventional place: The last two chapters of the Bible. Be on the lookout for that post soon as we begin our journey through the Bible together!
Bartholomew, C. G. (2024). The drama of scripture: Finding our place in the biblical story(3rd ed.). Baker Academic.
Great stuff!! What a wonderful intro into the story you’ll explore!