Chapter 9: Tell the Story (Step Three)

You’ve looked at the story through the lens of relationship to understand the factors that affect the relationships going on.  You’ve created a movie in your mind as if you were an eyewitness of these events.  Now we go to the third step and that is paraphrase.

Step Three—Tell the Story

When you come to the point of paraphrase, you want to be able to tell every detail of the story but to do so in your own words.  This strengthens the images in your mind and the story progression.   We’re still not to the stage of attaching the exact so use your own words.  Tell this story as if you were there and it is an eyewitness account.  If you have not created a strong story with a high sense of details in the movie in your imagination, you will be limited when you go to add the words.  If you’ve done Step one and Step two well, this should be a fairly easy step.

To show you an example of what the above story would look like in my own words as a paraphrase, I would probably say something akin to the following:

“Jesus was walking through one of the towns when a man came up who had leprosy from head to toe.  It was nasty.  When the man saw Jesus, instead of calling out “unclean!” he ran to him and fell with his face to the ground begged him for healing.  He kept saying, “Lord, if you’re willing you can make me clean.” 

Then Jesus did the unthinkable.  He reached out his hand and touched the man!  You heard me right, he touched him!  Then he told him, “I am willing, be clean!”  And would you believe it?!  That guy was instantly healed!  There was not a spot of leprosy on him ANYWHERE!” 

Everyone’s paraphrase will look and sound a little bit different.  This is OK as it needs to be in your own words and sound like you telling it.  But it also needs to resemble the storyline of the text as much as possible and reflective of your research. 

A key element is that you need to speak this out loud.  This may mean telling your pillow or the cat or dog this great story.  Ideally it is best to sit down with someone over coffee and tell them about this event you “saw.”  The biggest factor is to not let this be in your head alone.  It’s when your ears hear your own words that the story grows in strength.