Sabbath Devotional :: The Danger of a Single Story

Photo by Erol Ahmed, courtesy of Unsplash.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of my favorite thinkers, and one of her most well-known pieces is a talk she gave called “The Danger of a Single Story.” She discussed how powerful stories are — how they influence identity and belief systems, how we see the world, and how they help us learn empathy.

She also warned us against the danger of a single story: “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

I think about this all the time.

What stories am I telling about me? About my family? About my neighbors? Community? Fellow church members? Coworkers? The people living in my country? The gospel? God? About anything and everything?

Single stories are easy to digest. They erase complexities and nuance. They erase vibrancy. They make it more difficult to connect and knit our hearts together in unity.

The narratives we tell ourselves shape every aspect of our lives and our interactions. For a long time, I realized somehow I’d internalized an image of the mighty, vengeful, and wrathful God. A God who demanded excellence and perfection from me right now at all times. A God for whom anything less was not met with compassion, understanding, or invitations to do better, but rather a God who would cast me aside for those failures.

It was a powerful prevailing narrative I didn’t realize I had somehow acquired and one that has taken years and years to unpack — one I’m still unpacking. It’s not an unsupported story. Multiple biblical stories paint that picture, but many stories also paint a compassionate and kind God. It’s no wonder I had difficulty with meaningful prayer for so long when you think about who I envisioned myself praying to. I was focusing on a single story of God.

Likewise, when we think critically about the stories we have created about ourselves and others, we can start to see that we may be placing too much emphasis or giving too much weight to tiny pieces of the puzzle that make us who we are or that person who they are. We have a common refrain: we need to see people how God sees them. An idea C.S. Lewis popularized by reminding us that “there are no ordinary people” and that “we have never interacted with mere mortals.”

I think a lot of seeing with God’s eyes boils down to being able to see all the beautiful stories around us. If every single story about a person is like a thread, seeing people with God’s eyes might be like seeing how all those threads combine to make a beautiful tapestry. We can recall that some threads might be a bit knotted, frayed, or discolored, but they still work together to create a beautiful and worthwhile image. I think that’s what it means to see with God’s eyes.