It is not that stories are part of human life, but that human life is part of a story. It is not that there are stories that illustrate “how things are”; it is that we do not begin to understand how things are unless we understand how they were and how they ill be. Our so-called eternal truths are the attempts we make at particular moments in the story to grasp and state how things are in terms of our experience at that point. (Newbigin, The Open Secret, pp82-3)
We live in a storied reality. We cannot help but make meaning of our world and circumstance outside of the world and circumstance we find ourselves in. We only ever have contextual language and experience from which to establish metaphors. This is the foundation for each and every story we tell and find ourselves in. We do the best we ever can to give language and shape and life to the ways in which human life is a part of a story. We make meaning of the past and the present, conversing with the future in terms of our experience. This is not a shortcoming. This is simply reality.
