Churches Together
Let me offer you three responses to those questions.
These are not exhaustive and you will have your own insights.
In the first place stories provide us with a focus for our thinking and feeling, drawing us into the lived experience of individuals and groups.
We know about events such as 9/11 and terrorist atrocities in other parts of the world.
We know about conflict and suffering, the loss of life and the destruction of property, but it is when we hear the narratives of the ways in which personal lives have been changed, shattered and destroyed, of the ways in which communities have displayed remarkable courage and tenacity in the face of a world turned upside down for them, that we find ourselves drawn into their experience and begin to sense, albeit in perhaps only a minor way, the impact on ordinary people like us.
