Storytelling helps pass on our traditions, confess our failures, and even heal our wounds. As others hear our stories and read our stories, hope can be rekindled reminding us that someone else has gone through a similar experience, and made it to the other side. Storytelling also creates community as we laugh and sometimes cry together.
In my family, it is a cherished family trait, storytelling, the gift of gab, almost like a personal destiny. My dad was a great storyteller. Ironically, his initials, which I share as his oldest child, spell the word “GAB” which gave him the professional moniker, Gabby Bell. He could weave a believable yarn at any given time always enhanced by his perpetual radio voice. And, my dad never lacked a captive audience.
We lived in the Bible Belt in a small Kentucky town and everyone went to church except Dad. He considered going to church when he ran for mayor as his opponent was an avid church goer but ultimately chose against it as he passionately despised anything he deemed hypocritical.
Each week, as my mother prepared to take her children to Sunday school, I would feign illness or beg until she became impatient and agreed to let me stay home with the old GAB box, a name dad often used to describe himself when talking to his radio audience.
My dad and I would watch Face the Nation and Meet the Press, and talk about life. As we watched, Dad would tell me, “Baby, don’t ever take anything you hear on the news at face value. Remember, somebody is deciding what you are going to hear. Words are powerful. You need to know what you believe, and more importantly, why you believe it.”
He also gave me books to read, great stories that generally speaking were not deemed appropriate for a child. As my classmates were having fun with Dick and Jane in the first-grade reading primer, Dad gave me books like Edna Ferber’s Showboat.
There is no way I understood everything authors like Ferber wrote but reading that book made my tender heart aware of racial discrimination and though just a little girl, I began to understand the ties we all have to our past. All good stories help us do that.
The purpose of this blog is to tell my story and to fulfill that writer’s job “to act as a witness to the world, to remind us all to stay awake.”
My hope is that as I tell my story, my children and grandchildren will better understand their own roots, and that I can make sure they remember what their grandfather taught me: to always question what you are being told or what you read, to ask how and why.
Children emulate those they love, and my hope is that my children and grandchildren will also take up the mantle of storytelling, that they will all find their own personal song to sing, their own story to tell.
This blog, my story, is not for the super spiritual or the proudly academic: been there, done that. Rather, this blog is for those persons who understand what it is to have been downtrodden and beaten up and are looking for a path forward.
This blog is also for the lonely, for those who have a song rising in their own heart and feel that they have no one with whom to sing. Silence in your life can be deafening if you feel that you have no story to tell.
This blog is to put forth a beckoning call to that Christian sisterhood and brotherhood looking for someone to encourage them to tell their stories, someone to encourage them to come out of the wilderness and trust their own voices again:women and men who will help make our nation great, not by ambition but strength of character, rising above dire circumstances looking to God with faith.
As believers, you and I have the power to believe when others deny God’s existence, to hope when others despair, to love when others hurt. His grace allows all of us the freedom to acknowledge our whole life story, the light side and the dark side.
Digging Life 
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