A friend once cornered me after a meeting with great determination in his eyes.

“Bobby,” he said, “I have a very important message for you.”

I looked at my watch.

He spoke for twenty minutes.

By the end of it I had forgotten what the beginning was, lost track of the middle, and was silently praying for the end.

The next Sunday a little boy walked up to me and said, “Uncle, did you hear about the little puppy who kept chasing its own tail?”

In thirty seconds, I was smiling, listening and waiting for the ending.

That is the difference between preaching and storytelling.

Jesus knew it long before communication experts, motivational speakers and management consultants started charging thousands for teaching the art of communication.

If he ever stood for elections today, He would win hands down against every president, prime minister or king, with His brilliant parables and stories.

Because, He never merely announced a truth. He gently wrapped it inside a story.

Want to explain forgiveness? Tell the story of the Prodigal Son. Suddenly everyone in the crowd is no longer watching a teacher. They are watching a father standing at the gate, running towards a son who smells of filth and failure.

Want to explain compassion? Introduce a traveller lying wounded by the roadside. Let respectable people walk past him before an unlikely Samaritan stops. Without raising His voice, Jesus quietly changed the world’s definition of a neighbour.

I tried it once showing a burqa clad woman, helping up an old man from the majority community who had fallen on the road. But I was nowhere close to the original storyteller.

Want to explain faith? Scatter seeds into different kinds of soil. Want to explain prayer? Introduce a persistent widow knocking on a judge’s door. Every truth came dressed as a story.

People remembered the story first and discovered the lesson afterwards.

We do exactly the opposite.

We collect PowerPoint presentations, bullet points, complicated diagrams and lengthy sermons. We assume that if we speak longer and louder, people will remember better.

Usually, they remember less.

Our children remember the bedtime stories we told them years ago. They rarely remember the lectures we delivered after breaking a vase.

Stories sneak past closed minds and settle gently in open hearts.

Perhaps that is why one third of the world today follows the Man from Nazareth. His listeners could see themselves in His stories. They laughed, cried, argued, reflected and finally understood. Two thousand years later those same parables are still being read around dinner tables, in public places, in homes and in classrooms across the globe.

Maybe it is time we borrowed a page from the greatest storyteller who ever lived.

The next time you want to make a point, resist the temptation to preach, tell a story.

People may forget your sermon by tomorrow morning.

But a good story can quietly preach for a lifetime…!

———————————–

Become an author… Click here

————————————-

Would love to hear from you in the COMMENTS section below…and IF YOU WANT TO RECEIVE BOB’S BANTER EVERYDAY, PLEASE SEND YOUR NAME AND WHATSAPP PHONE NO TO [email protected]
————————————————–