WHY TRUTH NEEDS STORY
Davey told me a story he heard from a Rabbi. Let me paraphrase for you:
Truth came to the camp looking for friends. She sat with one group, but was shooed away quickly. So she moved on to the next group, and was shooed away again just as quickly. Time after time she was rejected, turned away, cursed and sworn at by the people.
So Truth went to Wisdom for help. Wisdom listened to Truth, all of her troubles. Then Wisdom went into her closet while Truth sat and waited. After a moment, Wisdom came back out with a garment and a smile. And she clothed Truth in a story, and sent her back into the camp.
Nervous, Truth approached a group in her new robe. The group, skeptical at first, began to soften more and more to Truth. And soon enough, she was the most popular person in the camp.
Stories are straight-up magic. They are the Trojan horses that bypass the head on the way to the heart. Great stories do the miraculous work of circumventing our judgements in order to present us with a truth claim. It’s one thing to outright tell someone that “love is the most transcendent force in the universe,” and it’s another thing to just watch a movie like Interstellar with them. It’s one thing to tell someone that “human beings and everything around them were made on purpose,” and another thing to marinate on the poetry in Genesis 2.
When we try to tell someone a truth outright, we often come across as a salesman at the door knocking incessantly trying to get them to buy something. And like a salesman at the door, listening to naked truth never sounds convenient. But what a story does is it gets peoples’ attention without invoking their judgements. “Can I tell you a story?” wakes up curiosity, while “Can I tell you a truth I learned?” wakes up skepticism. Curiosity engages the heart, skepticism engages the mind. And truths, beliefs, as much as we’d like to think otherwise, only truly transform us when they take root in our hearts, not just our minds. There are things we’d like to think we believe, but the things we really believe, the things that determine our decisions and our habits and our way of life, those live and grow in our hearts.
That’s what a story does. It earns trust from the heart to teach a lesson to the heart. It comes dressed in characters, quotes, settings, scenes, colors, twists and turns, all built and carefully crafted to earn trust from our hearts. All designed to help prepare your relationship with it to hear what it has to say. Great story isn’t the point, it’s just the vessel carrying a truth inside.
Whereas naked truths are hard to swallow and often outright rejected like a salesman at the door, a good story comes as a humble friend who wants to meet you where you are. They get invited to our dinner table because they are easy to listen to. And after a long, rich conversation, some laughs, maybe even tears, and a couple glasses of good wine, they give us the truth they’ve been preparing us for all along, even sometimes without outright saying it. Sometimes in the way they say it. Sometimes in way they don't say anything. Then once they’ve left, we feel like we’ve been impacted, even if we can’t say how. Something’s changed, something deep in us may have begun to shift.
To me, this underscores why it’s so important to tell good stories. This is why it’s important to care about everything from rich dialogue to grammatical correctness to clean audio in a video. All of this craftsmanship, this care, is around the point of making a story that can be trusted. I say it to myself all the time: excellence in what we make is the fastest way we will either make or break our audience’s trust.
So whether your stories come out in writing, in leadership, in photos, in parenthood, in painting, do this: care. Care about the vessel of story you’re telling, because those stories are the best medium through which you will impart the deepest truths to the people around you. In our stories, the ones we craft and the ones we live, we have the opportunity to cut the noise of the overcrowded mind, and say something that matters to the heart. We have the opportunity to become more united and understanding. We have the opportunity to change people’s beliefs about what’s true, and that is a gift and a responsibility that we shouldn’t take lightly.