The African Storyteller
In college I took a course, The African Storyteller, taught by an exceptional professor, Harold Scheub. The lecture hall would be packed with almost 500 students and the class was so popular that you typically had to wait until your last year in college to have enough seniority to register for it. People did not come because it was an easy course though. In fact, Professor Scheub was no push over and demanded punctuality and attendance. As soon as class started the doors were firmly shut, and he would immediately turn away anyone who tried to enter even a half a minute late. In a class of hundreds, he still found a way to determine if you were there or not. Every single class he handed out several copies of the class roster that would be passed down the aisles and you had to find your name and sign next to it. Though you quickly learned that he meant business, you also admired him because he put forth so much effort into everything. He even graded each of our exams himself, which consisted of solely essay questions, and wrote a long synopsis of what he liked and did not like about your answers.
You may ask, “What was so mesmerizing about his teachings?”, and I think it was the fact that he was not just re-telling stories he had read from books; rather, he was relaying stories he heard firsthand in Africa. It was not just head knowledge; the stories he acquired stemmed from his heart to experience and learn from the people firsthand. The stories had symbolism, rites of passage, and even life lessons that reached across cultures and applied to our own lives. Professor Scheub himself had spent about ten years in Africa, several years of which he walked miles on end from village to village to build relationships and collect stories from the locals. In fact, the woman depicted on the cover of our textbook, which I kept all these years, was a woman he proclaimed to be one of the greatest storytellers.
As the story goes, one morning Professor Scheub was walking around one of the villages in Africa, when he heard this Xhosa woman begin to tell this epic story to a few people that were scattered around her. She spoke for four hours, took a break for lunch, and then for spoke for several more hours. She finished and told them to come back tomorrow. The next day she continued the story, and this went on day after day for a total of twenty-one days. This was all for one epic story. Therefore, it is easy to see why he held her in such high regard and considered her to be a magnificent storyteller. I can only imagine the great depth and richness of detail that was involved as she wove together this tale that had been passed down in her family.
Though perhaps we do not have a story that spans generations and takes three weeks to tell, we all have things to share in our own lives that has its own significance and impact. Stories in our lives that become intermingled to form one larger story, our own epic journey. It is one that continues to build far after we have finished sharing that portion of our lives because we continue to encounter new experiences that add to that journey.
Although I love reading short testimonies of how God has moved in people’s lives, there is something special about diving a little deeper and getting a better glimpse of things that have shaped someone’s life and their relationship with the Lord. Over time, as people begin to share their faith journeys, I hope that you embrace them and that they resonate on some level. To me, it is easy to give people the picturesque version of your life that you post on social media, but it takes courage and bravery for people to be transparent and allow us to have a more heartfelt view of their life and God’s handiwork. It is that authenticity that leaves opportunities for true connection and more inspirational moments.
With that, we will start with our first faith journey soon, and that one will be mine. Obviously, it is the one that I know best, and it will take some time to get through…. maybe not twenty-one days though… it will probably be more on the order of forty days. Kidding, I think.