How to Tell a Stranger’s Story
The day that changed my mind (and helped me love my enemies)
Let me tell you a story.
One Saturday I sat in a church basement with a group of strangers. We had gathered for a workshop on storytelling, to learn how sharing stories could change communities.
The leader for the day was thought-provoking, wise, funny, and humble—the best kind. He told stories that grabbed our attention and spun the room upside down.
Now he was going to teach us to do the same.
But I was sweating buckets.
Because do you know what he asked us to do? The very thing that makes novelists leap for joy and memoirists (like moi) get itchy.
He asked us to tell someone else's story in the 1st person. Using "I," "me," and "my."
And not just any story, but a story of a moment in their life that held strong emotion. A story that mattered. A story that welled up anger or love or grief or joy or hatred or fear, even years later.
What's more, the story we had to tell in the 1st person was a story from the person sitting across from us. We had to listen to a perfect stranger and then tell their story back to them, using "I" and "me," inhabiting their own experience.
I wanted the floor to swallow me whole.
But he insisted. He had done this exercise in Northern Ireland, in South Africa, in rooms divided between NRA supporters and gun violence victims. He told us the way to cultivate compassion is to listen closely, not to rehearse our responses in our heads or sharpen our weapons of retort, but to listen for understanding.
So I swallowed all my anxiety and tried to listen.
The man in the folding chair across from me told me a story that broke my heart, a story he'd carried for decades, a story of going on a camping trip with his best friend and both of them jumping off a waterfall and only one of them surviving.
A story of returning home to tell his friends’ parents that their son had died.
When he finished, we both wiped our eyes. I took a raggedy breath and started to speak, to tell him his story as if it had happened to me: "When I was 18 years old, I took a camping trip with my buddy..."
I had to get the details right. I had to inhabit the experience with care. I had to honor everything hard about what happened to him, even the parts of the story I could not (or did not want to) understand.
When I finished, I made myself look him full in the face. His eyes welled with tears.
"Thank you," he said in a low voice. "I can't tell you what it felt like to have someone else tell my story like that."
That exchange would have been enough for a day, but we had to keep going. Now it was my turn. I told a hard story, and he listened. I was nervous to share it, and he was nervous to receive it, but we were tip-toeing our way into the upside-down exercise of empathy.
That's when the storyteller asked the whole room to stop again.
He told us to find another pair and pull our chairs as close together as we could. Now we had to share our partner's story with strangers.
Four of us dragged our chairs together, gave awkward smiles by way of introduction, and stared at each other for a few awful empty moments before one person spoke.
We started to tell each other's stories. I told his as if it were mine. He told mine as if it were his. We both listened to the other pair's stories, until suddenly there were four hard, heart-breaking, life-changing stories hanging in the air between us and none of us had spoken our own.
I have never forgotten that day. It taught me a new way to listen and to speak.
Now whenever I want to point a finger or roll my eyes or throw up my hands in disgust or disbelief at another person's position or opinion or perspective (which happens approximately every 12 seconds these days), I make myself remember that church basement and the holy change that comes when we enter another's story.
Can I invite you to try, too?
If you cannot understand why on earth someone would feel the way they do about vaccines or refugees or racism or politics or religion or any of the thousand stances we take toward the world, I invite you and your imagination to pause and pray your way into another’s story.
Try to tell it to yourself in the first person. Yes, it will make you squirm. No, it will not be easy.
But you will come away changed, if you let yourself inhabit the space of the story. You will find perspectives you hadn't seen from your corner. You will catch glimpses of divinity and humanity that you had not known before.
This exercise does not flatten perspectives—quite the opposite. It breathes life into flesh and bones. This experiment is not relativism: it does not ask you to abandon yourself or your beliefs. It asks you to consider—not in passing but in pressing close—why another might take the opposite stance.
Even when you come away from this experiment convinced that the other person’s position is wrong, you will have discovered new ways to engage with them that honor their full humanity.
Imagination and empathy are two of the holiest gifts God gave us. They allow us to bridge the distance between us. They cultivate compassion and they grow neighbor-love.
Why did Jesus tell so many stories? Because stories stick with us. Stories carry truth. Stories change hearts.
One day a lawyer stood up to test Jesus and to justify himself. Jesus told him a story about a good Samaritan, a story that asked him to imagine himself in the place of his loathsome enemy. A story that told him to go and do likewise.
That parable changes the world.
May we try the same.
Peace,
Laura
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