Interpretation and Story

I love Reeses peanut butter cups.  Your chocolate in my peanut butter, my peanut butter in your chocolate - better together yes and Yum!

So it is with interpretation and story.  Two things that are better together.  You can interpret without telling stories.  I know guides who use questions rather than story to help her visitors make their personal connections to the places she interprets.  And stories without interpretation might tug on our heartstrings  but eliciting sympathy, not empathy, pity, not compassion, happy for, not happy with.

But put the chocolate of story with the peanut butter of interpretation and voila - wonderment.  Now we have it all, emotion and connection, the sweetness of taking the journey through the story with the protagonist, and the stickiness of interpretation causing us to think about what we heard in ways that spark our curiosity to keep thinking, learning and making meaningful connections to our own lives into the future.