Choose Your Own Adventure!
Today in Sunday School we read the Parable of the Deep Well – a unique story because it has two alternate endings, based on different choices the person in the story might have made. This week, find the possibilities in other stories, and maybe even create your own!
Most of the Bible stories we read – most of the stories we read, period – have a straightforward structure with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But if you take inspiration from the Parable of the Deep Well, you can find places in any story where a decision was made, where the story could have gone one of two ways, but the characters in the story chose one way and not the other. We invite you to pick up your favorite Bible stories this week and read through them with the young people in your family. Pause when the people in the story have a choice to make, and talk about what might have happened if they had made a different one.
You can even apply this to stories about things that have happened to your kiddos – as you talk about the events of the past week, pause each story and reflect on the choices that were made, and how those choices affected the outcome.
Expanding out a step further, you can use the concept of choice to create your own “Choose Your Own Adventure” story. For those who haven’t heard of this book series, each story has a series of inflection points where the reader is asked to choose what the characters in the story should do next. Each choice requires the reader to turn to a different page, where the story proceeds from there, altered by the choice that have been made, until it branches out yet again the next time a choice is presented. Readers are positioned as co-creators of the story they are reading, and the books are infinitely re-readable.
In order to create your own, collect a stack of paper. Start your story on page one as usual, and pause when it’s time for your character to make a decision. One choice should take you to page 2, the other to page 3. Pick up the story on page 2, and write until there’s another choice to be made, then offer two options – now you have pages 4 and 5. Then go back to page 3 and do the same thing. Depending on the age of your young people, you may end each story thread there, or keep going! Your story will turn into a kind of reverse March Madness bracket, with branches quickly multiplying as you go. BE SURE TO LABEL YOUR PAGE NUMBERS! When you’ve finished your story, bind the pages together and enjoy reading and re-reading it to your heart’s content.
Not only is this kind of thinking a great way to help young people build decision-making and problem-solving skills, it also reminds them (and you!) that we are constantly making choices in our lives. Sometimes we make the right ones, sometimes we don’t, and sometimes it’s unclear what the best path would’ve been. But there is beauty in knowing that each of us is the author of our own story.
If your family creates a “choose your own adventure” story, we’d love to read it! Share what you can with us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
