Happily Ever After

When I was a child, many of the fairy tales I read began with the words once upon a time and ended with the phrase happily ever after. With these words, I was transported to a magical world where anything seemed possible. Stories like fairy tales captivate the minds of humans, youth and adults alike, because we were made to tell stories. Stories teach lessons, provide entertainment, evoke emotion, and bring people together. Stories are also inherently linked to identity. Stories define individuals, families, religions, and cultures. You can learn a lot about a group by the stories its members tell because the stories reflect what the group values. The same holds true for individuals. Narratives about personal experience show what an individual values — what events have shaped their life, what excites them, what causes them to fear, what they hope for, what they dread. Much of a person’s identity can be discovered through the stories they narrate.

Stories are so inherent to humanity that the brain has evolved a neural pathway for storytelling. Storytelling is ingrained into the human mind at the molecular level such that  “our brains are structured for story.”[1] Our seemingly frivolous capacity for storytelling is actually associated with a particular neurological function called episodic memory. Episodic memory deals with experiences rather than facts. Stories are born from such episodic memory and as such are “a personal memory that is unique to a time and place and emotional state.”[2] Any memory, any story, begins with how events are perceived, both physically and emotionally. These perceptions are registered by neurons in different cortices of the brain to create memory traces, which are unstable. Making these memories stable requires protein synthesis and gene expression in a process called consolidation. And even stable, consolidated memories can be updated in a sense as new perceptions add on to the existing memory.[3]. Essentially, these memories don’t require conscious thought. We don’t have to think about memory traces and protein synthesis and consolidation as they are simply the brain’s natural response. Without conscious thought, the brain is constantly weaving together memories, weaving together stories.

Human memory, however, is fallible. It is far from a perfect tape recording of the past, so why is it important to tell stories if they may not perfectly line up with the reality of events that occurred? Despite the flaws of memory, there are many benefits to weaving memory into personal narrative and sharing that narrative with others. First of all, people have complex pasts full of various memories — some of which are painful and confusing to sort through. Weaving these together in one cohesive narrative allows for reconciliation of some of the confusion and processing of things previously left unprocessed. Kate Schick describes this process in terms of victims of trauma, saying that “creative expression…can help individuals and communities begin to explore the impact of that loss and to make connections between the aspects of themselves…that are often fractured following extreme suffering.”[4] But stories aren’t made in a vacuum. They are made for a particular audience. In this sense, the act of storytelling can be seen as a “reciprocal relationship.”[5] In addition to providing personal healing from a painful past, weaving memory into a cohesive narrative also allows the storyteller to relate to the listener and vice versa. Experiences of the storyteller may be shared by the audience, sparking meaningful thought and conversation for audience members and storytellers alike. In a way, personal narrative opens a door for more personal narrative. It invites others to share their own stories, both similar and different to the one originally shared. This positive feedback loop leads to an accumulation of narrative weaving among many people — a story stemming from one memory into the lives of many.

For the Christian, storytelling can hold an even deeper significance. Christians often throw around the word “testimony” without realizing just how beautifully their mind is designed to tell their own story of faith. There is no perfect formula for a testimony because at its base it’s no more than a story. The difference between the testimony of a Christian and a general personal narrative is that a testimony is a story about more than just the person telling the story. It’s about God and how he impacts the story being told. Just like any personal narrative, a Christian testimony does not just impact one person but spreads to all who hear it. Christians are called to know and to be able to defend the reason for the hope they have in Christ Jesus (1 Peter 3:15), and part of this defense of hope comes in the form of a testimony. When interacting with all people, Christians have the opportunity to share the hope they have by giving parts or the whole of their own personal story. By sharing their hope, Christians extend the offer of hope to those without that same hope. Christians sharing their testimony with other Christians also holds much significance. As many testimonies include narratives of suffering, vulnerability, sin, and God’s faithfulness through all those things, the act of telling this story to another Christian opens the door for intimate relationships. Relationships built on vulnerability and trust yield so much fruit as they lay a strong foundation for that relationship. Sharing testimonies with other Christians also opens the door for reciprocal encouragement as those listening can speak into parts of the testimony they relate to and share parts of their own story that are similar or different. As mentioned above, there is no set pattern for what a testimony “should” look like, but all testimonies inherently reflect the principles of God’s goodness and faithfulness to his people amidst living in a broken world full of pain and suffering. This thread woven through each and every testimony finds its origin in the fact that each individual testimony comprises one small part of a grand master narrative that encompasses all peoples across all time — the narrative of a loving God on a mission to redeem his people and draw them into eternal relationship with himself.

1. Brockman, Richard. “Only Stories Matter: The Psychology and Neurobiology of Story.” American Imago 70, no. 3 (2013): 449. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26305060.
2. Ibid, 451.
3. Ibid, 452-53.
4. Schick, Kate. “Acting out and Working through: Trauma and (in)Security.” Review of International Studies 37, no. 4 (2011): 1849. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23025578.
5. Ibid, 1850.