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. Packer's 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 Fookdorff's parable about the cheat 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, spakey 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 Kratik calls this, overhearing the gospel, a great phrase, explaining that there are direct, but also indirect methods to teach.

Without dismissing the benefit of direct teaching, as it has its uses at times, the indirect method of a good story or parable, Kratik concludes, is often preferable because it elicits and draws out what is already known in the individual.

Indirect stories and parables, he argues, is a lot like a midwife, acting as an intermediary to draw out meaning that's already within.

Hank Smith from BYU's Religion Department, a great storyteller himself, by the way, has recently published a great book about the effectiveness of the parables of Jesus.

There was a couple of years ago, we started this, come follow me, and we're going to teach in the Savior's Way, and I read through the manuals going, that's not how Jesus taught.

If we want to teach in the Savior's Way, we walk in the room, we tell a random story, and then we leave, and we never explain what we meant by that.

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