Tell Your Story

13 April 2026  Acts 4:23-31

Monday of the Second Week of Easter

“…[E]nable your servants to speak your word with all boldness, as you stretch forth your hand to heal....” (Acts 4:29-30)     

People of all kinds get away with saying dark things like, “Life is not worth living,” or, “There is no meaning in life anymore,” and we imagine that they haven’t said anything more significant than, “There is a sale on tuna fish at the store.” They have made rather bold statements of fact, and we regard it as a matter of little consequence, whereas, if those statements are true, then the wolf really is at the door, and all people of good will are obliged to do something about it.

If things are really as bad as some get away with saying they are, then murderers should be be rewarded for taking life, and doctors should be punished for preserving it; the real dystopia would be reading books, and burning them would be a moral obligation; cemeteries would be amusement parks, and the Little Sisters of the Poor as degenerate as a horde as assassins.

Only some believers are rather reluctant to tell our stories about God’s mighty hand because we don’t think of them as facts, and so the Starbucks crowd doesn’t think of them that way either, and file them in the folder marked “tuna fish sales at the store.”

Christians are obliged to tell a more salutary story, one where God stretches forth His hand to heal (cf. Acts 4:29-30), and expressions like, “till death do us part,” “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” “so help me God,” and “He is risen as He said” don’t just have meaning, but are bold statements of fact that overrule the bleak declarations that are the daily bread of the chatter at Starbucks. Only some believers are rather reluctant to tell our stories about God’s mighty hand because we don’t think of them as facts, and so the Starbucks crowd doesn’t think of them that way either, and file them in the folder marked “tuna fish sales at the store.” The lessons of our stories are not thereby forever lost, but they can only be learned the hard way.

G.K. Chesterton tells a story about a lamp-post that many influential persons want to tear down. An old monk is approached about the matter, and he begins, “Let us consider first what we mean by Light,” but before he gets a syllable further, someone knocks him down, and a mob has the lamp-post down in ten minutes, afterward congratulating themselves for their unmedieval practicality:

But as things go on, they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post; some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, today, tomorrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas lamp, we must now discuss in the dark.   (Heretics, ch. 1).

It is good to learn how to tell some stories, some better stories, with vigor and as statements of bold facts, because the alternative is having to learn their lessons in the dark.