Back in my glory days in high school in Utah, I was a basketball player, was being the key word in that sentence, by the way.

And one of our players on our team was not a Latter-day Saint, and sometimes we and some of his friends tried to teach him about the church in our teenage wisdom, usually to no avail.

But when my older brother left on his mission, my non-Latter-day

Saint friend attended his mission farewell. I still remember that my brother gave a parable in

his mission farewell talk that he called the gospel according to basketball. When the meeting

was all over, my friend turned to me and he said, that was the first time in my entire life I've ever understood anything about Jesus.

Because they're so effective, it's not uncommon to use parables to help people understand gospel teachings.

There's something in us that seeks to take abstract heavenly concepts

and relate them to concrete earthly experiences.

Think of so many classic parables in the church,

like Stephen Robinson's famous parable of the bicycle,

or Brad Wilcox's famous parable of the piano to help us understand grace.

Boyd K. Packers, Parable of the

mediator to help us understand the Atonement, or David A. Bednar's Parable of the Pickle, to

understand conversion. And one of my personal favorites, Elder Dieter of Fugdorce, parable about the

cheap man on the Mediterranean pleasure cruise. And of course, Jesus as the master teacher of all, often

employed teaching through parables. In fact, the book of Mark says that, quote, without a parable,

spake he not unto them, end of quote. One thing that is different from a good moral of the story

and an effective parable, however, is that good parables

are multi-layered, and the teacher often leaves them uninterpreted as people reflect on them again

and again, drawing different meaning. The Christian preacher named Fred Craddock calls this

overhearing the gospel, a great phrase, explaining that there are direct but also indirect methods

...