So we got this routine in my house that I absolutely love, I treasure it. I've got these three kids and I'm crazy about

them. I'm invested in them. I love watching them become all the things that they're becoming. I love watching

their minds flower. I love watching them understand story better and I think story is

really important so I'm very invested in that and I put a lot of energy into trying to help them break down the individual elements of story and not just to think through like what do you think so and so is going to do next but through, why is the author saying it this way?

What would be the natural place for this story to go next?

Where do we detect the twists?

And a couple of reasons for that.

One is I want them to understand the Bible better, and there's a ton of story in the Bible.

Two, I want them to understand human nature better and good storytelling forces you to gain insight or work on your insight skills into understanding how we're wired

as human beings.

And three, I want them to see the beauty of this most human of art forms. You think about it.

Music, movies, poetry, visual art, everything that humans create is in one way or another overtly a story or is rooted in

story. So if you're good at story and you're intentional in practicing it, you're

going to be able to decode the matrix of all of human existence way better.

And I want them to have that skill set and working with them causes me to grow on the skill set.

So I told you there's this thing that we do.

The thing, the ritual that we do is we sit

down in one of the kids bedrooms each night and we read just some chapters of some story. Usually the story is pretty

innocuous. Right now we're processing through the

Rangers Apprentice series by John Flanagan and it's fun even to watch John Flanagan

improve as an author from book to book early on. It's like, oh, this is pretty clunky,

but you know, I like what you're trying to do.

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