stories on Training

Becoming a Navy Seal is considered the most challenging training of any military unit in the U.S. military. And as difficult as most of their training is, nothing can compare to BUDS, which stands for...

Several years ago I was conducting a seminar in the interpretation of Scripture in a theological seminary…Our topic that day was Jesus’ parables…One of the priests, Tony Byrnne, was a Jesuit missionar...

The marvellous thing about learning from a story is that a story never ends, so our learning from it need not end either. p.98.

A close friend who started a financial loan business took thirty of his executives to the poverty- and violence-filled section of Montreal where he grew up in order to introduce them to the section of...

When I was fifteen, I applied for my first job, at Eureka Baking Company, and ran into a complication. The job interview was a few miles from my high school, and I didn’t have a way to get there. I su...

A pilgrimage is a journey undertaken in response to a story.

A good story goes beyond just describing what actually happened. It tells us about how the world works more broadly, in ways that pertain to things that didn’t actually happen or at least haven’t happ...

Why a story? We all think of our lives as stories, each with a main character (us) theme, and plot (interesteing so far, but as yet unfinished). We also love to hear stories about others and even abou...

Groundbreaking work by Dr. Uri Hasson has shown that the brain of an individual listening to a story actually synchronizes with the brain of the individual telling the story—an event known as neural c...

What often continues to shape our stories (interpretations) are the implicit emotional responses to our wounds. We must be willing to attend to our wounds and address the emotions embedded in our woun...

Stories are about the vicissitudes of human intention. Trouble is what drives the drama.

From [age three] on out, stories will not only entertain you, they will explain you to others and to yourself.

Stories are inherently interesting. Discourse we tolerate; to story we attend. Story entertains, informs, involves, motivates, authenticates, and mirrors existence. By creating a narrative world, stor...

The moral a story teaches is, fundamentally, to the heart.

Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.

300 10-Minute Devotions For the past six years I’ve been a volunteer chaplain at Haywood Pathways Center , a Christian residential program for people working to turn their lives around from addict...

Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.

Joining the Story “We read to know that we are not alone” (Anthony Hopkins as C. S. Lewis in Shadowlands ). That’s also why we listen to sermons. Someone once told me that in every sermon they hope ...

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

We make our home by stories.

Stories, it turns out, are not optional. They are essential. Our need for them reflects the very nature of perceptual experience, and storytelling is embedded in the brain itself.

The Old Testament on its own is an unfinished story; a promise without a fulfilment. We must read on to the New Testament if we want to know what it really means. And the New Testament constantly look...

A Story is life with the dull parts taken out.

Stories, after all, are one of the most basic modes of human life and are a characteristic expression of worldview. Human life is constituted by a series of stories, implicit and explicit, that makes ...

We have never lived enough. Our experience is, without fiction, too confined and too parochial. Literature extends it, making us reflect and feel about what might otherwise be too distant for feeling....

I have a word for you. I know your whole life story. I know every skeleton in your closet. I know every moment of sin, shame, dishonesty and degraded love that has darkened your past. Right now I know...

Tragedy gives movement to our story as we attempt to change or give meaning to our taste of death. Yet we are always much more than our tragedies. Each one of us is unique. We have a different name, f...

Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player. That struts and frets his hour upon the stage. And then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

One of my daughters has been singing a song about Jesus that contains the line “Jesus was a story-tellin’ man.” When I first heard that line it seemed a bit flip, as so many contemporary Christian son...

I believe we all need to reframe our stories, at least parts of them, in order to heal, to discard lies, to move from partial truths to richer, fuller explanations, to see our lives as God sees them.