Story Heals like Good Medicine

Telling, listening, and presence

Once upon a time, people simply shared stories. One person would tell a story, and another would listen, and around the group it would go. Some people were better tellers than others, and some were better listeners. But storytelling was about telling and listening, both in a moment of presence.

Now, the science of storytelling is big business. We are human beings trying to find our way in a world where pure reason fails us, and we are hungry for something more. We can be manipulated by stories. But true, authentic stories help us find who we are, where we belong, and a connection to something more. They don’t leave us where they found us. Like good medicine, they heal us.

Every night, Elizabeth follows the same bedtime ritual.

She pulls her small step stool to the sink and climbs up to brush her teeth. Her own face in the mirror delights her. She climbs down. She goes to her room, arranging toys and stuffed animals for the night’s rest in the enchanted world only she knows. Elizabeth slides under the covers, and one of her parents slides in beside her. This is the moment she has been waiting for.

“Tell me a story about when you were a kid,” she says. “It has to be true.”

Elizabeth, like all of us, loves a good story with her favorite people as the main characters, but she does not want only to be entertained. Her longing for stories contains the longing for belonging, identity, healing, and even transformation. To what story do I belong? What kind of people are we? What brings us joy? How do we navigate to the other side when things are hard?

Telling a story about when they were kids invites her parents to renarrate moments of their childhood—even though it may be hard at the end of a long day. They retrieve a story and tell it with the truth they know now. Because Elizabeth asked for a true story, they aim to speak with integrity. Because they love her, they aim to speak with compassion.

Aside from the content of the parents’ stories, the telling and listening itself actually creates belonging. Neuroscientific research shows that when people listen to the same story, their brains begin to synchronize, not only in sound processing, but in meaning-making. Story draws people into shared emotions and understanding. In a time when loneliness has been named a public health crisis, story functions as a form of communion.

This may be one of the quiet frontiers of congregational innovation. Not better branding or more efficient programming, but communities that relearn how to tell and receive true stories in one another’s presence. Congregations at their best have always been storytelling communities. We rehearse ancient stories while confessing personal ones and discovering how they braid together. Innovation in this landscape may not mean inventing something new. It may mean recovering the practices that create belonging, like testimony, lament, confession, witness, or shared memory. In a culture saturated with content yet starving for connection, a congregation can become a place where stories are not consumed but held.

Stories also invite transformation. When Elizabeth’s mom tells of the time she got left behind at McDonald’s, she is not only the lost child but also now the mother who will rescue. Narrative psychologists tell us that healing comes when stories are retold with themes of agency, relationship, redemption, and coherence.

Agency, communion, redemption, coherence? I know this story. This is a healing story. These are the patterns that appear again and again in the way Jesus heals. He restores a hand, and a man can work. He stops the flow of blood, and a woman can return to community. He receives their suffering into a larger story of forgiveness and freedom. Lives are not simply fixed. They are re-storied.

Finally, stories re-enchant a world flattened by efficiency and information. Philosopher Charles Taylor describes modern life as shaped by the “buffered self,” an understanding of identity sealed off from mystery, transcendence, and deep relationality. Authentic stories told with compassion and integrity and received by ears of love pierce that buffer. They draw us into a thicker world, one in which more is happening than can be fully explained.

This is what the child knows when she asks for a story that is true: It leads to belonging, to healing, and to mystery. This is the salve for what ails her –for what ails us all.

Healing arrives the way it does at bedtime, through presence, truth, and the quiet work of being held in a story.