As I’ve done a hundred times before, I sat in a booth with a friend and English student of mine at a trendy, overly-priced coffee shop in the city. I had an English book in my backpack, but that day, we didn’t need it. We just talked. And that’s when he began telling me a story. It was the story of a movie he’d just watched with his two young children.
You might have heard this one. It’s about a young man and woman who met as children and fell in love and decided to spend their lives together going on adventures. A waterfall on top of a soaring mountain peak was their destination of choice, so they began saving for it. Then life happened. They wanted to have children of their own, but they never could. Event after event wiped out their savings, and they never had enough money to go on their dream trip. Finally, the man, now gray haired, wanted to surprise his wife with tickets to go their long-sought destination. But his wife, a petite little old lady by this point, died before they could go, and the man was left all alone in the house where he’d spent his entire life with a single, faithful woman by his side. The man got sad and angry.
Then a little boy knocked on his door, an intruder into the man’s dreary world, and even though the man told the boy to get lost, as fate would have it, the two of them inadvertently ended up going on an adventure together to the man’s waterfall. A pack of dogs, a bird, a hunter, and a lot of balloons later, the old man finally came around and took a liking to the boy, and by the end, he became like the father the little boy never had.
I felt a surge of various emotion as I listened to this story again from the lips of a young man trying to recount the tale to me in his best yet broken English. There was a deep sense of heaviness. Laura and I relate all too well to the man and his wife when they stood at the doctor’s office realizing that their longed for dream of a child of their own would never come true. There was a desire to imitate the couple in the story in their life-long commitment to each other, in their steadfastness to not let the unforeseen events of life get them down, and in their constancy in holding fast to each other when literally everything else slips away. And I was able to taste the unimaginable sadness that would be mine if God decided to take Laura before he took me.
I couldn’t believe how powerfully this simple story told in the simplest way had seemingly reached all the way down to the very core of my being and had begun stirring up all sorts of things down there. My friend didn’t have the slightest idea. But he’d given me a precious gift. The gift of a story, a chance to experience certain aspects of reality that my daily life doesn’t afford me. Right there in that booth I felt again my own deepest longings for children rise to the surface. I felt inspired and encouraged to be a better husband, to enjoy every God-given moment I have with Laura instead of letting rainy days wash away my joy. And I was able to reflect on how much more valuable human relationships are than the achievement of even one’s loftiest dream. It isn’t what you accomplish in your life, is it? It’s who you accomplish it with that matters.
Stories speak, and they do so on a level much deeper than the level of mere words. They’re able to capture whole worlds of meaning in a picture, a picture not reducible to sets of mere propositions, and relate nearly tangible experiences to those listening in.
And so I’m thankful for stories and the worlds within them they beg us to enter and explore.