10

I wasn’t sure what to say to Nehemiah this afternoon. The news of children being slaughtered this week was awful.^[1] I mostly wanted to sit quietly and try to understand. He waited. I realized that he’d seen his own share of brutality and confusion and questions.

“Why did you tell so many stories?” I asked Nehemiah.

“I didn’t,” he said.

“But the whole book is a story. And I read about you telling stories all the time.”

“Read it again,” he said. “I’m not telling so many stories. I’m telling the same stories so many times.”

“What’s the difference?”

“There’s a huge difference. If you tell too many stories, you may just start creating an appetite for novelty, an appetite for the next story. People want to hear Rob’s story and then Megin’s version of the story and then the story about Rob’s response to Megin’s story and how the kids reacted.”

“Is that bad? I mean, assuming that it’s a funny story and not about the time he broke his leg.”

“It’s not bad unless all you are ever doing is talking about people and their problems. It’s so easy to slide into gossip. It’s so easy to start feeding 24-hour news cycles.”

I looked at him. “What do you know about the news?”

Nehemiah laughed. “I thought you read the book. Remember when people came to me ten times talking about the way Sanballat and Tobiah were plotting against us?^[2] It was the main story on the early morning news for nearly two weeks. Every morning when people came in from their villages to work on the wall, I heard the news: ‘You should have seen Sanballat’s campfire last night. It was huge. And the war songs they were singing. I couldn’t sleep, even after they stopped.’”

I thought for a couple minutes. I saw the daily commute to work, the villages, the children. I understood a little more clearly the fear that must have been in the hearts of the workers. The rebuilding wasn’t just another construction process. People were afraid for their lives.

“Tell me more about the stories,” I said.

Nehemiah leaned forward. “Leaders tell stories that lay out the values, that remind people in the group why the group exists. And they tell these stories over and over, even in times of crisis. Maybe even to prevent times of crisis.

“You started this conversation as a way to talk about the last half of chapter 8. You wanted to talk about the Feast of Booths as a lived-out story. But I don’t think that when you started, you understood the significance of the repetition of stories.”

He was right on both counts. I did want to cover some material. And I did get surprised when we started.

“How did you repeat the stories?” I asked.

“First, I told the story of the broken walls to encourage my heart to start, to capture the king’s heart, to resist the temptation to quit. Remember how many times I talked about it? ‘The city is in ruins, the gates are burned.’^[3] That story was the genesis of the project. As you lead, remind people of the significant problem you are solving together.

“Second, I told the story of God’s work in Susa to encourage the people to start.^[4] When I first got to Jerusalem, they didn’t know me, though they knew my family. I needed to tell them who I was and what God did. If you hadn’t figured it out, chapters 1 and 2 are the summary of what I told them. As you lead, remind people of God’s involvement from the start.

“Third, I told the story of God’s power to strengthen hearts in the middle of the journey.^[5] In the middle of every project, people get tired. To fight the gossip and the news, they need the big picture, the real story. As you lead, remind the people of God’s power.

“Fourth, God gave the feasts as annual stories to build us into a people. After we finished the wall, we started into the cycle of feasts. As we’ll see in a moment, the Feast of Booths is a perfect example of how God taught us to remember the story. He gave us symbolic behavior to act out the time in the wilderness. As you lead, make the lessons visual.”

I looked up. “We talked about that visual idea with the shaking out the folds of your robe.”

“Precisely. People need to see what an invisible God looks like. So God gives feasts and celebrations and ceremonies for us to live out as reminders and explanations and incarnations of his story.

“Let’s go back to Nehemiah. On the day after the New Year’s celebration, the leaders went back to Ezra. They wanted to know more about a feast he had mentioned in his reading. So he unrolled the scroll to the very end of Deuteronomy. On the day that Moses blessed the people and blessed Joshua, he highlighted the importance of the Feast of Booths.

At the end of every seven years, in the year for canceling debts, during the Festival of Tabernacles, when all Israel comes to appear before the Lord your God at the place he will choose, you shall read this law before them in their hearing. Assemble the people—men, women and children, and the foreigners residing in your towns—so they can listen and learn to fear the Lord your God and follow carefully all the words of this law. Their children, who do not know this law, must hear it and learn to fear the Lord your God as long as you live in the land you are crossing the Jordan to possess.^[6]

“Children may not understand the big sermons, the theology textbooks. But picture this.^[7] A family goes out into the country and cuts branches from palm trees and poplars. Because this is right after harvest, they also get the best fruit from the trees. They come home and build a little shelter with the branches. It was pretty fragile. They spend the week sleeping in the shelter. They still go about their work, except on the Sabbaths, but their home life revolves around this booth.

“Their kids say, ‘why are we doing this?’ And the parents say, ‘because God took us out of Egypt. And we spent 40 years in the wilderness. During that whole time, God gave us manna. God kept our clothes from wearing out. God protected us.'”

Nehemiah sat back thoughtfully. “Every year we were supposed to build these little booths. It was like an annual camping trip. Every year we were reminded, and our kids were reminded. As you lead, live out the stories that God gave you to live.”

We sat for a bit, thinking about kids and stories and learning and living the why of the people.

“That was a pretty big tent party that year,” I said. “Biggest since Joshua?”^[8]

“We celebrated well,” he replied. “We partied like no one had since Joshua held the first celebrations of this feast. Because we knew what it was like to have no story.”

And then he was gone.