Stories have been told since the dawn of consciousness. Good stories are a healing force. Easter is one of the good stories linked to a new season carrying a truth that spreadsheets, white papers and formulas can’t reach. What ever you believe or don’t this commemoration strides across history as a good story, a story that heals, a story saves many from despair and encourages millions more toward goodness. It is a story that resurrects hope for many in what appears a hopeless age. Every culture and religion has their stories that heal and encourage in the same real way medicines in a pharmacy heal, reducing pain and suffering.

Every human being creates a unique story, like a finger print that grows with that person. These unique identity stories are shape shifting stories, loved and loathed in parts and pieces, while changing over time as they mature in us, becoming true in different ways with a new suite of feelings associated. Our lives are a unique twist of narratives woven with the narratives of other loved ones and nurturers. In this age this importance of our personal story is so easy to lose track of. We are actually often encouraged to forget, undermine and undervalue ourselves and our stories. Sometimes our stories are hijacked, shanghaied, and enslaved to other more powerful people’s interests as we can see so painfully with America’s political culture today.

This Easter let us celebrate the sacred stories embedded in our own souls along with the souls of families, friends, community and nation. Let us hold on to a system that protects the dignity of every person’s story be those persons stateless, immigrant, guest in this country, guilty or innocent. If you can believe in resurrection than certainly you can believe every story has another chapter. Yes we can have safety and the universal expression of dignity concurrently. The salvation of our story and other person’s is simply a radically different skill set. Good stories can set us free which would be good.