Praying about the flow of time: Paying attention to our stories

Lynne Baab • Wednesday July 16 2025

“People in fact change by the offer of new models, images, and pictures of how the pieces of life fit together. Transformation is the slow, steady process of inviting each other into a counterstory about God, world, neighbor, and self. This slow, steady process has as counterpoint the subversive process of unlearning and disengaging from a story we find no longer to be credible or adequate.”—Walter Brueggemann, Texts Under Negotiation

In this church season of Ordinary Time, I’m encouraging you, my beloved readers, to think about the daily, ordinary Christian journey. One aspect of our daily life of discipleship is to be open to God’s transformation. To long for it. To try to figure out how to participate in the work of the Holy Spirit in us, transforming us into the image of Jesus.

The quotation from Brueggemann invites us to think about the stories that shape our lives. For almost a year, I have been writing a series of blog posts about holidays, dates, and seasons. This week, I want to highlight three of the posts that center on stories.

1. The most-read post on this blog in the past year is the one about the Chinese New Year. I interviewed four people of Chinese or Taiwanese descent in my church. All four interviewees have built on their memories of Chinese New Year from childhood, bringing a beautiful Christian emphasis into their stories. If you didn’t see the post, be sure to read to the very end, where I included a much longer story than I would typically put in a blog post. My interviewees have engaged in “a counterstory about God, world, neighbor, and self.” Their stories are counter to the American story of individualism. Their stories builds on the Chinese story in beautiful ways.

2. One of my top memorable sermons from my many decades of attending church drew on the story of the people of Israel living in tents in the wilderness. I wrote about the flexibility of that picture in my post for the Feast of Tabernacles, which will be October 6 to 13 this year. As I get older, I am trying to listen to stories about fluidity and flexibility, something that does not come naturally to me. I sense God’s desire to bring transformation in me, to grow in trusting God in the midst of movement rather than relying on plans and schedules to feel safe.

I love the story of King David’s desire to build a temple for God, but God forbade him. God liked the fact that the tabernacle could move with the people. God says to David, “I have been with you wherever you went.” Then God switches the story: “Moreover, the Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house (2 Samuel 7: 9, 11). Flexibility and movement are how God works (how challenging for me!). And the Holy Spirit is building something in us in the same way that God established a royal house through David that came to fullness in Jesus.

3. The road to Emmaus story, after Jesus’s resurrection, has been a favorite story of mine for decades (Luke 24:13-35). I fell in love with the story as a young adult because I long to see Jesus face to face. I resonate with that amazing moment when the two disciples’ eyes were opened and they saw him clearly. I wrote four posts about the story right after Easter this year. To my surprise, the post that got the most response from readers focused on the unity of the Bible in the road to Emmaus story. Early in my life as a Christian, I could see that Jesus’s conversation with the two disciples on the road laid the foundation for a Christian understanding of God's covenant love both in both the Old and New Testaments.

When I began to study hospitality around the turn of the millennium, I saw so much about hospitality in that story. We host others, and they become Jesus for us. Here’s my post about guests and hosts in the road to Emmaus story.

My personal journey these days involves learning to pay attention to the messages my body is trying to convey to me. After the two disciples see that their companion is Jesus, one of them says, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32). Their whole beings — soul, spirit, mind, AND body — knew something amazing had happened. In Brueggemann’s words, I have been “unlearning and disengaging from a story we find no longer to be credible or adequate.” I’ve been unlearning the story that only my mind, soul, and spirit matter. I have been learning to stand with the two disciples and be transformed into a disciple of Jesus who listens to her body. I tried to describe that perspective when I wrote about listening to our bodies.

God, you tell us your story over and over. We long to hear it afresh today, so that we can counter the messages from our self-focused, individualistic consumer culture. Give us your new models, images, and pictures of how the pieces of life fit together. Enable us to grasp your perspective so we can honor you in our ordinary days and grow every day into Jesus’s image.

֍ ֍ ֍

Next week: more about Ordinary Time. Illustration by Dave Baab.

֍ ֍ ֍

Two ways to subscribe.

If you’d like to receive an email when I post on this blog, sign up below under “subscribe.” That email and the posts on this blog are free and accessible for all.

If you’d like to help me cover the expenses for this blog and website, plus get a bonus post every month, you can subscribe on Patreon for $3 or $6 per month. My bonus posts focus on one or more of the hundreds of vivid quotations I’ve collected over five decades.

« Previous post

Lynne Baab