Story Time

Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

If you hang out on Facebook, you know there are memes and challenges and such that make the rounds...and every once in awhile, someone tags me in one.

Some I skip....because, well, it's just not something I have anything worthwhile to say on the subject..  Some I do when there's a more convenient time frame.

I got tagged in one last week that I decided to participate in.

The idea was that you post a picture of a book you love once a day for seven days...and challenge one other person each day to do the same.

Foster the love of reading!  Find out who loves the same books!  Maybe find another great read that you hadn't met yet!

Of the 7 people I tagged, only one actually did it.  Four gave it a pass...not the right time for them, or they just don't do those things.  Two appeared to be confused by the instructions.

But those things should come with a warning...because I sat down and re-read 5 of the books post haste...as in, I sat up past midnight every night re-reading one of the books I loved.  Here are the 5 I re-read last week:

Granted, most of them are very short.  I didn't re-read the first two that I posted ...Silverlock, by John Meyers Meyers and  C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy (yeah, I know, that was three books but it's one story, lol)...mostly because I knew it would take more than just a couple of hours to read those, so I resisted the siren call.  But by the third night I failed at resisting and jumped in and read.

I slept really late this morning, making up for lost sleep.

I didn't chose the obvious favorites...I tried to pick books that likely weren't going to show up on someone else's list.  But all of them were books that I have loved for years...although Ender's Shadow is a newcomer to the list that I found within the past 10 - 12 ish years.

But today, thinking about the books, I realized something.  If you asked me what my top favorite books are, the ones I read over and over...the list would be overwhelmingly fiction.  Not completely...some of Madeleine L'Engles non-fiction would be on the list...but generally speaking, my old friends are...stories.  And even the favorite non-fiction are autobiographical.  Which is, of course, story that is factual.

Stories have shaped my world view in a way that non-fiction,  however good, doesn't often do. I have read many really, really good topical books, but...I rarely quote them, and even though I remember that they were good and I learned from them, I can't really articulate what it was.  I can't think of many that I have read more than once

It's no wonder at all why Jesus used story so much.  Story tells truth in a way that we can remember it.  The illustrations of story make the lessons stick.

Something to keep in mind when the creative urge comes...