Storied Living

From Eugene Peterson's “Living into God’s Story”: 

“Telling a story is the primary verbal way of accounting for life the way we live it in actual day-by-day reality... And so when we lose touch with our lives, our souls... story is the best way of getting us back in touch again. Which is why God' Word is given for the most part in the form of story.”

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Dear Kate,

The quote you picked today is from an essay that I'd shared with many of my friends over the years, one time to tell them my joy of knowing a fabulous study Bible.

So I think, why not, let me post that email here (red letters below), for them then and for you now.

I think I've written long emails, personal letters to all my friends. Some of them have received words many enough to compile into a book.  But that is a story for another day.

Yours, Alex
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Dear friends,

If you are receiving this email, you are either in my Small Group, and/or my Book Club, or just a friend that I know who cares about reading God's Word and living in history--His-Story.

Recently I've been sharing with many of you how grateful I am for a new Study Bible that Zondervan publishes since last August, the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible.

In this LINK you will find a "Preview" sampler.

I strongly encourage you to read page 32 to 34 in the Preview, with the heading "Major Background Issues from the Ancient Near East," because it will give you a good feel about the purpose of this Study Bible.

(If you are a video person, HERE is 2 brief minutes from the authors.)

I've spent years reading many books to pick up the major background issues in Biblical time, and had never seen them being put together in such a concise and accessible manner.  I was almost in tears when I read the aforementioned part and realized how this Bible can and will bless God's people richly, furthering His Kingdom work.  This Bible is meant to get everyone excited about Bible reading.

If you like to read reviews, please click HERE or HERE or HERE.  (Mind you that these are US sites, and the Canadian pricing can be quite different.  If you are interested to order, please let me know and I will talk to you about how to get the best Canadian price.)

Thank you for your kind attention.  I will close with a  question that a Book Club member asked me last night: (I am paraphrasing her) "It is good to know about all these backgrounds and specific context of the Biblical text, but ultimately what does it mean?  What is the purpose of knowing all these?  How are they relevant to my Christian life?"

A great, most important question.  If today we find our entire being, down to the most minuscule, mundane detail of our next action, not being energized, enlivened, fired-up by knowing our place in God's story, such is the question we should be asking ourselves.  How we long to be carried by the wind that is the Spirit!

To answer, let me here summon the help of the most important man in my life, my mentor, my teacher, my pastor, my spiritual father, Eugene Peterson.  Here I attached a document of his little essay "Living into God's Story."  I encourage you to read it very slowly and thoughtfully.  It may change your life as it did mine.  (I am also pasting the whole piece at the end of this email, in case you cannot open the file.)

Have a blessed week.  Let me know if you have any question about this Bible or anything else.  Alex

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Dear Alex,

Why would anyone tell a personal story inducing sleep or fatigue? Who cares to listen to the sort of story spoken by ordinary lethargic lives? What intimacy in any story of Winter prevalent even in Summer?

Yesterday was another dreary Wintry day for me. Off-work day. Nothing dramatic or surreal... but let me recall the day for the sake of teasing the tedium of day-by-day reality.

I got up before dawn to observe not sunrise but my dog’s usual business on my front frosted lawn. I fantasized about flight to the Forbidden Palace in Beijing before retreating in silence to my room in a plain cottage of a plain neighborhood to a plain town unnamed unknown in most maps. I wanted to announce big boundless things of life, of love, of liberty, the stuff of literature. Instead I drooled back in bed, a pig head heading nowhere.

Around mid morning I told myself I was important. I joined an important phone conference with an important colleague to recommend my important bullet points bolded underlined twice. Thirty minutes of feeling puffier and feistier. Back in touch again.

Soon in the next thirty minutes I made myself poofier with a Thai lunch buffet plus 3 fluffy fruity slices topped with half cup of iced triple-mocha coffee. I meant it all as a way of giving back to the livelihood of my local eatery. Generosity in flashy flesh of a story, isn’t it, Alex?

Don’t laugh now: in the afternoon I watched my first Clint Eastwood movie, The Mule. About drug cartels but more. On contradictions and penitence as off-cliff crazy as the 88-year-young actor, director and producer himself for the film! Loosely thematic for me to thread my own narrative in his wavelengths. Shadows revealing more than light. Leisurely potent in words and questions simple. My center of gravity shifted. I paid $ 6.50 for my matinee ticket.

Tonight I have not stopped thinking of the movie. I suspect I will dream in it too. Because this story is cheap and reachable. Exhaustingly ordinary in its search for simple things in life love liberty calling for anything but ordinary. Because telling a story tells about me, us, in the first and final Story where we all belong in. Here let me know more about your story.

P.S. Nearly 2 yrs after your original email letter sent out to your friends, I have just read it and bought the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible. It should arrive later this week. Stories. Lives ordinary. Changes intimately extraordinary.

Yours, Kate