The walk to school from our back door takes 195 seconds, give or take. This means our morning story has to hit its narrative climax somewhere around two minutes, leaving a solid minute for the dénouement, or a minute to set up for the next installment of the escapades of George, the renegade alley cat, and Mrs. CluckCluck, our neighbor’s hen.

Our walk-to-school micro stories, though hardly long enough for the dignifying label of story, are the most anticipated part of our morning routine. My daughters are drawn to these scrappy sidewalk episodes both because of their own nature as story-formed beings and because of the nature of stories to delight and direct us. But the compelling power of stories is double edged: that stories draw us in should give us pause as parents to take care with the models we offer our children.

Story-Formed Beings

In an attempt to get at the essence of our love for stories, we could begin with the sweeping narrative model that teaches us who we are and that forms our expectations for what is and what might be. We can root our love of story in what Kevin DeYoung has called the “biggest story,” or Scripture’s archetypal story.

What we call “redemptive history” is, at its essence, a narrative arc from creation through the fall, through covenants and disobediences and exiles, to Christ’s incarnation, his atoning death and triumphant resurrection, his ascension, the launch of the early church and its growth with the spread of the gospel — all of which look forward to the consummation of time in Christ’s return, his final judgment, and the creation of a new heavens and earth. Because redemptive history’s claims encompass all of reality — and give reality a beginning, middle, and ever-after end — Scripture sets expectations for what it means for a story to be a story. It offers a framework for plot itself by establishing a setting, introducing a problem, and developing the rising tension into a climax from which all possible resolution follows.

Scripture’s redemptive story arc hardly means that all stories ought to end or develop the same way, but the storied-ness of redemptive history provides an explanation for what we could call “narrative hunger” — a deep suspicion that nothing in this world is static and a hopeful anticipation that anything and everything might move along such an arc.

Because the Bible’s redemptive narrative encompasses all of human history, we know we can find ourselves somewhere along its immense story arc — somewhere deep in the growth of the global church. And our placement within this larger story teaches us, in part, to make sense of who we are. This expansive narrative, however, also echoes in each individual experience of turning from sin toward God in a life transformed by the gospel. Thus, while we encounter redemption as one massive story, we also experience it as countless little stories of justification, sanctification, and glorification.

Making Like Our Maker

The shape and significance of redemptive history is but one way to explain how we are story-formed. We could also probe the doctrine of creation, for example, to connect our status as creatures to our capacity and desire to create stories. God authors reality as its Creator. In an analogous way, J.R.R. Tolkien argues, we as sub-creators make worlds out of words. Although fictional worlds display massive creativity, they cannot free themselves from the ethical and even theological logic of the world God has made since, at a minimum, they are authored and read by humans who live in God’s world. In other words, whether authors choose to embrace or defy the moral underpinning of reality, that foundation is always there like an open question in any work: How does this story stand against reality?

Instead, if stories are made by humans who are made by God, who, in turn, frames reality, then authors can offer beauty, goodness, and truth in a host of invented worlds — and readers, in turn, will be able to recognize and be surprised by the familiar good, even if the encounter looks wildly different. Thomas Austin captures the deep moral transfer from God’s created world to fictional worlds in his song lyric, “Just because it didn’t happen doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” While places or characters might be “invented” as opposed to “historical,” the significance or meaning of actions, motives, and events are not “made up” but rather carried over from our world to another world.

Moral and theological truths are not, meanwhile, merely politely present in fictional worlds; they tend to leap out and trounce us. In his recent Rabbit Room newsletter, Andrew Peterson recalls in stories a “great power to tell the truth beautifully.” It is perhaps no surprise that we tend to use violent verbs to describe the experience of reading such literature: “That last chapter really got me.” “It arrested my attention.” “I was seized by that scene.” “Her sacrifice struck me.” The violent language is not merely hyperbole; metaphors acknowledge the great power in stories to compel our hearts and minds to behold truth.

Powerful Models

But stories’ great power is not limited to making us feel deep in our bones only what is good, lovely, right, pure, excellent, admirable, praiseworthy. Stories tend to make compelling whatever they present. Much of the power of stories comes from their ability to help us see, in magnified terms, what had become small and commonplace to us. Stories linger and extrapolate. And that act of taking time creates and stages compelling models for us, training our desires.

“Stories tend to make compelling whatever they present.”

While I argued earlier that stories cannot “free” themselves from God’s moral universe as creations of God’s creation (humans), stories (and the worlds they offer) absolutely can war against God’s moral framing of the world or proliferate seductive alternatives, much in the way God’s creatures can rebel against him, suppress his truth in unrighteousness, and cast about for anything else to satisfy.

So yes, Thomas Austin is delightfully right: “Just because it didn’t happen doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” But buyer beware: just because it didn’t happen doesn’t mean it is true. And all those marvelous, sympathetic things that didn’t happen tend to compel us both when they are morally true and when they are not. Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is a sustained defense of the positive moral and theologically formative power of stories, but Spenser is all too aware of stories’ power as “painted forgeries”: his villain in book 1 is a powerful artificer — a “maker-upper” — named Archimago, and he is out to destroy Redcrosse, the knight of holiness, with every compelling fiction he can conjure.

Hold Fast Through Fiction

As parents, it can often feel overwhelming to meet the basic needs of our children. If children are so drawn to stories and if stories are so formative, the risks feel considerably higher as we gather stories to feed their hearts and minds. And our expectations are high; we care not only about the vitality of our children’s moral imagination (what is good in the world and how to order our lives in the pursuit of it), but we also care for their theological imaginations (God as the greatest good to pursue). So, how might we as parents eager to give good gifts to our children distinguish between the less-than-obvious scorpion-versus-eggs stories?

One of my go-to questions is to ask, “What does this story want me to want?” Stories appeal to our imitative natures as humans made in the image of God by offering us all kinds of models, and these models are often sympathetic and deeply knowable. When fictional characters offer us their interior monologues and very thoughts through an omniscient narrator, such access gives us a profound opportunity to see the world through their eyes: an Anne of Green Gables and her quest for bosom friends, for example, or Robin Hood and his ethics of theft from noble Norman thieves.

This intimacy with characters, in turn, raises the question, “What kind of a world does this character offer me, and how does the story as a whole react to the desires of any given character?” For example, Kenneth Grahame’s Mr. Toad has an inexhaustibly high opinion of himself, but the rest of the woodland creatures (and the narrator) reject it, and when they can’t reform it, they reprove it, often by a humor that judges it.

With our children, we can take a story as a whole or characters one by one to weigh what kinds of actions, motives, and events are held up to be good, lovely, right, pure, excellent, or admirable. Practice fitting names to their reactions to the logic and lore of fictional worlds. My parents used to pray nightly over my siblings and me that the Lord would give us the grace to hate what is evil and cling to what is good (Romans 12:9), and then they gave us ten thousand fictional friends to love and with whom to explore what it might mean to hold fast.