Street Psalms trains and connects leaders around the globe to build communities of peace

In 2007, when he was a young pastor at a church plant in Salem, Oregon, the Rev. D.J. Vincent noticed that a group of unhoused people had been living in Cascades Gateway Park. He and his parishioners wanted to do something to help them out and settled on a simple idea: They’d host a potluck.

That impulse to share a single meal started a ministry that has grown into a multimillion-dollar nonprofit called Church @ the Park. It now offers outreach services, workforce development, emergency shelter and permanent housing to the area’s unhoused population. In 2024 they served nearly 2,000 people across six locations.

As Church @ the Park evolved, so too did Vincent’s approach to ministry. From his conversations with unhoused folks at the meals, he gained a new perspective about dignity, humility and relationships. He felt he needed to change the way he was thinking about his service work; in looking for guidance he came across Street Psalms, a faith-based organization committed to developing strong community leaders.

The organization, a network of more than 40 organizations in 100 cities around the world, was formed to help create “communities in mission” that foster human flourishing in urban spaces. Street Psalms is based on “theology from below” — that is, learning alongside people at the margins rather than imposing solutions from above. This approach aligned with Vincent’s experience at the potlucks.

“Street Psalms created a bubble of belonging for us,” Vincent said. “They value connectedness and relationship, and our organizational values are the Street Psalms values. We aren’t just a place for people to get resources, but where they can find value and dignity and responsibility.”

Learning to be peacemakers

Street Psalms calls itself a “sodal” expression of the church, as opposed to a more traditional “modal” one. “Sodal” comes from the Latin “sodalitas,” meaning “companion” or “partner.” The organization uses this description to explain how it seeks to develop leaders who are embedded in vulnerable urban communities, people who are trying to enact meaningful change in their cities.

“We’re an urban monastery without walls,” said Sarah Moore, Street Psalms’ senior fellow for applied research, who came to the organization after a career as a psychology professor. “We prepare people for the challenges they face out in the real world of service.”

Forming leaders who serve communities

Thompson has been with Street Psalms since it was founded in the 1990s. The organization initially served urban youth workers in Philadelphia and was an initiative of the Pew Charitable Trust. Kris Rocke, the current executive director, had written a curriculum for World Vision, a youth mentorship organization, and he realized that the leadership skills it cultivated could be applied to anyone looking to share the “good news in hard places.” In 2023, Street Psalms officially became a religious order.

“Our charism has crystallized, especially over the past eight years,” Thompson said. “We’re committed to the formation of leaders who are serving their communities. It takes a special kind of spirituality to do this work, and we realized people weren’t getting the training they needed in a more formal seminary.”

While Street Psalms has always mentored leaders in their specific contexts, its programming and curriculum has become more formalized and refined over the years. Its nontraditional seminary is not affiliated with a denomination and does not ordain pastors for local churches. Instead, it trains people to lead communities in mission. It ordained its first cohort of leaders in 2010.

“We say we’re joyfully unaccredited,” Moore said. “While we do not believe, not at all, that this replaces formalized and accredited seminary training, we do believe that this offers the type of transformational experience that prepares leaders to serve the sodal form of the church.”

Street Psalms offers a one-year novitiate program that ends in ordination. Through daily, weekly, and monthly rhythms and practices, as well as synchronous and asynchronous classes and workshops, ordinands learn the Incarnational Framework and how to employ it in their communities. Nearly 40 people around the globe have been ordained. The organization also has a one-year fellowship program that finances specific community projects. Funded by grants from large and small benefactors, it gives all of its materials away for free.

The program is rooted in a specific hermeneutic, a way of reading the Bible that prioritizes and centers the most vulnerable people in Bible stories and parables.

“What you practice with Street Psalms is a way of reading Scripture from below, from the perspective of the marginalized,” Thompson said.

“During my formal training for my M.Div., nobody helped me see that the context of Scripture is about people who were oppressed,” she said. “It’s written to tell that story, but you very rarely hear that. The Lord’s Prayer, for example, came about during the context of the Roman Empire. When you think about it like that it gives it a new resonance.”

Learning to read with this lens prepares leaders in urban communities to ask questions of the text that might unlock new significance for its constituents and to be open to new and surprising interpretations.

“One of the big things the church doesn’t talk enough about, that Street Psalms does talk about, is violence,” Thompson said. “It’s not just physical violence, either. It can be the political thing and the pressure to pick sides.

“With Street Psalms, we want to curate the kind of conversations that don’t create enemies on the other side. I don’t know where I’d be as a preacher or as a spiritual leader if I didn’t have this framework.”

Building ‘communities in mission’ around the globe

Street Psalms trains leaders to love their city and seek peace in it, which entails learning how to listen to their city’s “sacred song”— the literal meaning of “psalm.”

“With the name, you have two images coming together and resonating,” Thompson said. “’Street’ says, ‘I’m here,’ ‘I’m with my community.’ And ‘Psalms’ is all the joy and lament that you find there. All the raw ways history shows up through our people.”

The organization takes different forms with all its partners; every mushroom that blooms from the network is unique. These partners do many kinds of work, from homeless outreach to after-school programs to helping survivors of domestic abuse and walking with people coming out of prison. And they’re all over the globe.

When an organization commits to following the Incarnational Framework, it becomes a “community in mission,” which in the simplest terms means that it shares the See, Do, Be, Free philosophy and can tap into a web of support when it needs help navigating challenges that can arise when doing things with people and not just for them.

“We’re kind of like the wholesalers,” Moore said. “And our partners are the retailers.”

Changing the way leaders engage with the world

In addition to the seminary, Street Psalms runs a design studio that functions as a kind of incubator for innovative social change. Partners can put their ideas through their paces before testing them out in the world.

One idea that came out of this is the Preaching Peace Initiative. At gatherings called “Tables,” partners tackle issues that pertain to their communities using the Incarnational Framework and the “theology from below” hermeneutic. Thompson visited a Table at one of Street Psalms’ partners in Kenya.

“In Nairobi there was a Preaching Peace Table with Christian pastors and Muslim clerics, and they took a common theme and discussed it from their different perspectives,” she said, adding that there had been violence between these communities in the past.

“The theme was: ‘What does it mean to love your neighbor?’ So you get in this room and you see the kind of conversation about peace. It helped foster these ideas of abundance and peacemaking and asked what it would look like for that to exist there, in that community.”

Thompson likened that work to what Vincent is doing with Church @ the Park.

“They have a clear picture of what it means to serve the most vulnerable,” she said. “They have a common language of scarcity and abundance and what it means to work across difference for the sake of the poor.”

During the early potlucks, Vincent saw problems to be solved, needs to be met, deficits to be addressed — what he regards now as classic scarcity thinking. But as he listened to the people he was serving, he learned to see differently. His perspective shifted to one of abundance and collaboration. And he understood that the community already had what it needed to flourish.

“We grew into a ministry of mutuality, where folks can find not only resources, but value and dignity,” he said. “The goal is co-creating a better reality, and we are our best selves in community, not in isolation.”

Vincent now takes all of Church @ the Park’s staff through a version of the Incarnational Framework during their training. He wants the organization to be as inclusive as possible, serving people regardless of their faith background, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other typical dividing line. More than half of the employees don’t identify as religious, but they’ve found a sense of belonging in the organization and its mission for peace and relational abundance. This kind of radical acceptance and baseline humility is what helps make Street Psalms unique.

“It’s more than a curriculum or content,” Moore said. “If you embrace the framework, it changes the way you engage with the world.”

As a pastor, I went to plenty of meetings where we wrestled with how to attract visitors. We talked about lots of ideas, but I never actually asked a visitor.

Last year, I became a visitor.

I had transitioned out of parish ministry to work with organizations representing Catholic, Orthodox, and more than 60 Protestant denominations and movements. Inspired by my new role, I began visiting different congregations. Over the course of a year, I worshipped in a cathedral and a storefront church, in the great outdoors and a retirement home. I visited one church because I noticed it while sitting at a red light and was welcomed as a guest of honor at another when I went to hear a colleague preach. Along the way, I witnessed ordinary and extraordinary moments in the lives of many different congregations through the eyes of a visitor.

We enter the season of Advent recalling how difficult it was for the Holy Family to find welcome. It is also a moment in the church year when visitors are more likely to cross the thresholds of our sanctuaries. How might we help them find the welcome that the Holy Family was denied?

While I have taken too many theology classes and attended too many fellowship hall potlucks to be an ordinary visitor, I still take a deep breath as I walk into an unfamiliar church. Entering as a visitor, I notice things I missed when I was wearing a stole. I hope these experiences will help clergy and longtime members consider a visitor’s perspective of the place you love and what you can do to welcome the stranger this Christmas and beyond.

1. Help me find the entrance

Churches have a habit of not using their front doors. One church I visited holds its early service in the fellowship hall. When I arrived, I walked up to the door closest to the parking lot and realized it went into the kitchen. That didn’t feel right, so I walked the length of the building to the second door. Entering there would have required me to walk by the band. No, thank you!

One of the hardest parts of visiting a new church was navigating the space between the car and the pew. Clear signs helped me feel welcome, and that calmed at least one anxiety.

Take action: Starting in the parking lot, imagine a visitor trying to find the sanctuary. What doors are most obvious? Are there any turns that don’t have a sign? Bonus points if you walk through with a friend who has never been to your church.

2. Help me follow the service

It was my first time attending an AME service, and my transferable knowledge was at its limit. In this church, members of the congregation go forward for the offering and place their gifts in a small replica of the church. I have no idea how I would have navigated that moment had the woman sitting next to me not leaned over and explained what was about to happen.

Churches that used prayer books brought a different kind of challenge. There is something deeply hospitable about being handed an open hymnal or prayer book with a finger on the right line. Bulletins with explanatory notes also helped me find my way.

Take action: Consider what elements of your service are hardest to follow and encourage the congregation to look for visitors who may need some guidance in those moments.

3. Welcome warmly but gently

I have come and gone from churches without speaking to a soul and have had a member chase me down in the parking lot for a conversation. How do you welcome visitors without scaring them off? I found that the way I was welcomed back mattered.

When I visited small and aging congregations, it was common for folks to tell me, “We hope you come back.” Perhaps it was all those new-visitor conversations I had as a pastor, but I always felt some pressure with that invitation. It was clearly heartfelt. But it also felt a little wistful, as if I were the key to the future flourishing of the congregation.

One Sunday, I was given a different invitation: “You are welcome back any time.” In that simple sentence, I felt all of the welcome and none of the pressure. It said that they would continue to be the church as they always had. If I wanted to be a part of that, the doors were open.

Take action: Discuss as a hospitality committee when you have felt most welcome in a space and why. Then identify welcoming conversation starters to engage visitors.

4. The website is where it’s at …

I Googled most of the churches I visited. As with your doors, think about what questions visitors are asking as they pull up your website. Make that information easy to find. The first thing I looked for was what time services were held. It’s also helpful to say something about parking if it isn’t obvious or abundant.

A change to a church’s normal routine doesn’t always make it to the website. Sometimes the surprise was delightful, such as when I unexpectedly walked in on a combined Episcopal and Mennonite service. The theology nerd in me was in paradise. At other times, it meant showing up to locked doors or an empty parking lot.

Take action: Ask someone who doesn’t attend your church to look at your website and share feedback. Add updating outward-facing communications to the to-do list for special Sundays.

5. … AND it’s not why I came to your church

When I started this visiting adventure, I went to churches where I already knew someone. It wasn’t the Facebook posts or community events that drew me. It was a relationship. The best advertisement for your congregation is the people in the pews. Most of these folks didn’t invite me directly, but I knew where they attended. When I was ready to visit, I reached out.

Take action: Tell your members they matter! Equip them to answer questions like where to enter and whether child care is provided.

This Christmas, may we extend the welcome that the Holy Family longed for to the strangers who are sitting in our pews.

As a clinical psychologist, I spend much of my professional time helping make sense of what happens when things go wrong. Anxiety, depression and other struggles can dominate conversations with my clients.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where the same can be true for many of us. Wars are raging around the globe. Here, in one of the world’s richest countries, millions live in poverty. Our government seems to be in a perpetual state of chaos. It is easy to reside in a kind of existential dread that permeates our hearts, minds and souls.

While it is important to reckon with the reality of the suffering that exists in the world, it is also important for us not to become overwhelmed by it. Joy is an essential antidote in a suffering world.

Proverbs 17:22 (ESV) tells us, “A joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.” For believers, joy is not just a perk of the Christian life; it’s a spiritual resource that helps us carry out our work in the world.

A dictionary might define “joy” as a state of happiness in response to external circumstances. But our kind of joy is one that rests in the knowledge of what God has done and will continue to do. Our kind of joy is not dependent on what is happening in the world; it is a commitment to see good and recognize the presence of good in the world and in ourselves, regardless of our circumstances. Joy is the product of our ever-present knowledge of God’s movement and work in our lives.

I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting that joy means we ignore all the bad. While some of us may have a tendency to use our faith to try to pretend our trials away (a process we mental health professionals call spiritual bypassing), the joy I’m suggesting does not negate the presence of evil or suffering in the world.

In fact, tapping into joy in our lives is what helps us fight injustice and work toward good for all. Joy keeps us going when we want to give up and keeps us fueled for the journey ahead by reminding us that suffering is an experience and not a destination.

As many cultures that have experienced historical violence and trauma can attest, joy is often the thing that helps us survive the unspeakable. As the proverb says, joy is a medicine and a healing balm, and when we lose it, our vitality dries up and disappears. It is no accident that we find moments of laughter at memorial celebrations, no accident that we spent the first few months of the pandemic lockdowns making jokes on the internet. Joy reminds us that we are alive when things feel perilous.

Because we live in a world that can exhaust and overwhelm us, we must be intentional about organizing our lives in a way that allows us access to the gift of joy. Ross Gay writes in “The Book of Delights” about his decision to find delights intentionally on a daily basis. He says of the process: “I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight.” We must remember that joy and sorrow can, and will, coexist.

To be intentional about accessing joy is to make a practice of holding sacred time for the things that help us feel most content, at peace and close to God. For some, it may be physical exercise or spending time with our most beloved friends or family. For others, it might be time in nature, crafting or cooking. For others, it might be listening to music, committing to a devotional or other spiritual practice, or playing a game.

In her book “Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto,” Tricia Hersey proclaims that resting is an explicit resistance to a capitalist society that demands we treat our bodies as dispensable and our souls as inconsequential. While joy and rest are not the same, joy can most certainly be found in rest. And rest can help us be more open to the joy in our lives.

There is no single right way. The point here is that to have joy as a resource, we must decide to make it a part of our lives. We must actively seek out joy rather than waiting for it to come to us.

When I am helping clients navigate depression or recover from burnout, I often ask them to identify the drains and wells in their lives. Drains are things that deplete and exhaust us. Wells are things that energize and excite us. Wells refill our proverbial cups, while drains cause them to empty.

Both are necessary parts of our lives. But when we are able to identify the wells, we can be intentional about having access to them all around our lives so that we never have to get empty. This is the power of joy! Our ability to access it regularly and often allows us to operate from a place of overflow rather than depletion. Simply put, joy sustains us for the journey.

For each of us, this is an individualized process. Ask yourself: What lights me up? What makes me feel most alive?

What would it be like to organize our lives around our joys, just as biblical cities were built around wells? What if those wells in our lives — those things that sustain and revitalize us — become nonnegotiables, so that all the mundane tasks of our lives have to fall into place in relation to them?

To organize ourselves around joy in this way is to participate in a reparative process, declining to sacrifice ourselves and our spirits to an unjust world, instead claiming a holy retention of our goodness and our “godness.” To recognize the reality of our goodness is to acknowledge that we are deserving of light, joyful, playful moments. Those moments can then become the home base from which we navigate the world.

Chapter 11: Sacred Stories

The hard work of life is remembering. Remembering who you are, remembering how you want to be in the world, remembering where you last left the kids. Down through the centuries our ancestors have told and retold stories to help us find our way. Sacred stories that remind us of our true identity. Soul stories to encourage us to pursue our deepest yearnings for freedom. Told from one seeking heart to another, these sacred stories function like a lighthouse — guiding us away from the shallows, leading us toward the more gracious depths of who we are.

When asked why he spoke in parables, Jesus told his followers (as paraphrased by Anthony de Mello): The shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story. All wisdom traditions entrust stories to embody their deepest truths. The Bible is full of stories. The Bhagavad Gita is a story. The Buddha’s life teachings are embedded in story form. The life of Muhammad is transmitted through story. Jesus’s life and teachings are communicated through story.

Science is also a story that seeks to unveil reality and dispel illusion. Behind the doctrine, the rules, the rituals, and the institutions of all wisdom traditions, you find stories that not only seek to transmit teachings but invite a deeper, more liberating experience of the self and the world.

The power of stories to free us, whether religious or secular, depends on the integrity and compassion of the tellers and the openness of the listeners. The sacred stories of religion are often at first glance amusing relics, utter nonsense, even potentially destructive — unless they are shared by people who are knowledgeable and trustworthy. Only within the sacred bond of compassionate teller and seeking listener can we know a story’s worth. It is within that trusting container where we can give ourselves to the story. There we can expose our hurt and longing to its plotlines and allow the story to read us. There we can allow ourselves to enter the story. Not as fact. More than fact. As a way of seeing, as a gateway to peace, as a pathway home.

There we can allow ourselves to fall into the story’s rhythms and feel its truths. The same way we might give our body to the steps of a dance in order to feel its joy. Slow, slow, quick-quick, slow, quick-quick, slow, slow.

                                                             *****

I was in a lost, longing-for-meaning place in my midtwenties. For about six months I could hardly sleep more than a handful of hours. All the repressed wounds of my childhood were radiating out from me like a high-grade fever. There was a terrifying emptiness gathering within me, a gnawing sense of worthlessness, and the only way I knew to address it was to stay busy and distract myself from the anxiety by working and working and working. I became mindlessly driven, physically ragged, deeply sleep deprived. My marriage suffered and my health deteriorated. I began to obsess about finding a new job, certain that different employment would give me some sense of peace.

It took a good friend and colleague to recognize my crisis was more than vocational. Tenderly, persistently, he convinced me to join him on a contemplative retreat at a Franciscan convent. I agreed — but only under the ridiculous stipulation that I could commute home each night to catch up on work.

There are parts of ourselves that can’t be known, places within us that can’t be accessed without a story. The week at the Franciscan convent was destabilizing. Full of silence, prayer, long periods of solitude, I was forced to feel the stark, despairing state I was in. I was lost and hurting and had no idea what to do. Every morning the retreat teacher gave a talk and then offered a spiritual practice. Each talk was based on a story that sought to uncover our deeper nature.

One morning he told us the story of the prodigal son, one of the parables of Jesus.

A man has two sons. The younger son is restless, impatient. He goes to his father and asks for his half of the inheritance. The father agrees. The son takes the money, heads into the nearby city, and eventually spends it all on parties, prostitutes, dissolute living. A famine descends upon the land. Broke, desperate, working for a pig farmer to feed himself, the young man decides to return home, apologize, and see if he might be hired as a farmhand — a much better life than his current state. While walking the road home, the father sees his son and takes off running. Before the younger son can fully apologize, the father embraces him, places his rings on his son’s fingers, and instructs the servants to prepare a celebration.

Meanwhile the elder son is out working in the fields. He hears music and revelry. He asks one of the field hands to investigate. “Your brother has returned,” the field hand reports. “Your father is throwing a celebration.” The elder brother is greatly triggered by this news. Filled with resentment, he refuses to join the party. The father hears the response of his eldest. He leaves the festivities, goes out into the fields, and begs his son to join the party. The elder son is indignant. He reminds his father of his loyalty, frugality, and hard work. How could he celebrate a son who has been so self-serving, disrespectful, and wasteful? The father feels compassion for his eldest boy. He reminds him everything else he has belongs to his eldest. The father adds, “But we had to rejoice because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life, was blind but now he sees.”

The retreat teacher invited us to personally interact with the parable. We were sent out to find a solitary place to meditate on the story, with instructions to try and see, hear, taste, smell, and feel the story as if we were there. He encouraged us to go wherever the meditation took us — allow ourselves to become one of the characters, place the story in a modern setting, or change the characters from a father and two sons to a mother and two daughters if helpful.

I found an empty basement classroom in the convent, sat alone in the dark, and as instructed, gave my imagination over to the story of the prodigal son. I saw the dust of the road, heard the goats and sheep in the nearby field. I saw the sons, the eldest responsibly and dutifully heading out to the fields, the younger son pacing, dissatisfied. As if it were an old home movie, I watched the story take place within me.

I have no idea how much time passed, but then something happened. Like a lucid dream, I fell into the story. I could smell the dry earth, feel the sun on my back, hear the distant laughter and music from a party. I was the elder brother. I felt depleted, isolated, hopeless, full of resentment — and then surprisingly, in the midst of this story-dreaming, I felt a visceral sense of overwhelming welcome, a sense of being held. An unburdening, a release, a compassionate embrace. I wept, and the aloneness and fear and sense of failure I had been carrying dissipated.

When I finally pulled myself together, I immediately wondered if I was having some kind of psychological breakdown. The experience was so powerful I thought I might be losing my mind. I went to find the retreat leader, Morton Kelsey, who was not only an Episcopal priest but also a trained psychotherapist of forty years. I assumed he would offer a diagnosis and recommend medication or therapy or possibly even some time in an institution.

Troubled and disoriented, I found Morton in the cafeteria and asked if he would meet with me. After evening prayer we found a quiet place to talk. I told him my experience of the meditation, fully expecting him to become alarmed. Instead he told me a story, one about growing up with a father who could be quite remote and demanding. He then asked me about my own upbringing, my relationship with my parents. I answered as best I could.

Then he told me a story about his first job. Back and forth we went, like village bells answering one another across a valley, with various experiences from our lives. Whatever note I struck in my story, he would strike a similar note, allowing me to feel heard and understood. For almost three hours we sat facing one another, telling stories, back and forth, back and forth, until there was a deeply felt connection. Eventually the hour became late, our words spent. Morton stood to leave, and I suddenly realized he had not answered my question.

“But what about the meditation? Was it a breakdown?”

“Well,” he said thoughtfully. “What do you think? We’ve been talking for hours. You seem calm. You’re speaking coherently. Your body seems relaxed. You don’t seem agitated in any way. It doesn’t appear to me you are having a psychotic break. Maybe it was something else? Maybe it was Divine Love. Maybe it was God.”

                                                                   *****

“There must always be two kinds of art,” writes poet W. H. Auden. “Escape art, for humans need escape as we need food and deep sleep, and parable art, the art which shall teach us to unlearn hatred and learn love.” My experience at the Franciscan convent is the sacred story of how I began to live from a deeper awareness of love and truth. It was the beginning of a healing season for me that included therapy, long talks with my wife, a commitment to spiritual practice, a different approach to work.

My friends who are secular humanists would tell it another way. They might describe my experience as a breakthrough of the unconscious or of transference of care from teacher to student. I’m okay with that. But since it is my sacred story, I tell it in the way that feels most true for me.

Your sacred story may have a different setting. Maybe it takes place at a bowling alley, a community center, a mountain lake, a grandmother’s kitchen, a desert plateau, a detention center, a Girl Scout camp. Maybe your story begins in divorce, the wake of grief, the ecstasy of nature, a quest for truth, a near-death experience, a restless longing for love. And in your story you might replace the Episcopal priest with a molecular biologist, a Holocaust survivor, a cognitive therapist, a Buddhist nun, a Native American elder, the old guy who lived next door. And in your story, instead of a Jesus parable, there might be a conversation about galaxies, a pilgrimage to your mother’s home village, a letter from a trusted friend, a mindfulness practice, a month of solitude in a Minnesota cabin, a heartfelt conversation with your best friend’s father, a stranger’s confession in an AA group.

There is a depth to story that we rarely take time to ponder, let alone to tell and hear. Story is how we transform pain. Story is how we make something useful out of the absurd. A sacred story is a love letter expanding your heart with kindness. A sacred story is a treasure box filled with images of what matters most. A sacred story is a map, passed down through generations, directing you toward a fountain of truth. A sacred story is a medicine, a balm to relieve your fear and suffering. A sacred story is an angel in the night. A sacred story is a window that offers perspective. Sometimes a sacred story is a shield, a protector, a source of courage and love. Sometimes your sacred story is what gives you strength to face the real and present dangers of our world. Sometimes your sacred story spends years searching for you, trailing you through all your harried days, cornering you in some blue fluorescent rehab center, looking you in the eye, and saying, “Okay, here’s the truth.”

What are the images, the moments, the stories on which your soul meditates? What are the stories that remind you to unlearn hatred and receive love? Nigerian author Ben Okri declared, “We live by stories. We also live in them. One way or another, we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted — knowingly or unknowingly — in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly, we change our lives.”

Are the stories that shape you death dealing or life giving? Do the stories you hold as sacred heal, or do they exacerbate the suffering? Do they bring out your loving nature, do they cultivate freedom? Or do they bum you out, make you more afraid, anxious, resentful, and bitter? What are the stories you hold as sacred, the ones you tell your children, the ones you want remembered at your funeral? And are they any good?

Reprinted with permission from “Between the Listening and the Telling: How Stories Can Save Us,” by Mark Yaconelli, copyright © 2022 Broadleaf Books.