On Saturday afternoons when I was a kid about 10 years old, my Grandpa Hofer used to sit me and my younger brother Mark, and our two cousins, Heather and James, down to read us stories from the Bible.

The day usually started earlier with the four of us cousins, three boys and one girl, playing out in the yard, getting all sweaty and dirty and tired riling up the neighbor’s dog Toby, playing hide and seek, and teasing my cousin Heather relentlessly until she cried and us boys would get in trouble for being mean to her.

Shortly after we had crossed the line from being cute kids to unmanageable brats, my grandma would call us in for lunch, and then after lunch, before we went back outside to play, my grandpa would read us a story from the Bible.

This was a very important ritual, a very somber and serious ritual, and our parents made it very clear to us that we were to be on our best, most respectful behavior.

Grandpa would sit down in his favorite big old recliner. It was definitely an “old school” grandpa-chair for people who had grown up with dustbowls and Great Depressions. It was a firm, lightly-padded, austere sort of chair. You see, my grandpa was an austere sort of man.

At one point earlier, according to my mom, my grandpa had been a softer, gentler, more demonstrative sort of man. But at 10, all I saw was a serious, stern, pious man who would brook no guff from naughty little children. So on those Saturday afternoons when he would read to us, we would sit on the floor politely in a semicircle around him, sitting on our knees or on our butts with our legs crossed in front of us, doing our best to stifle our ornery giggles until he was done.

Grandpa never reclined in that chair. He was, after all, reading the very word of God, and to kick back in a situation like that would be downright disrespectful. No, a reading from the Bible warranted the most austere, serious, and respectful bearing one could muster. So he would lean forward, feet on the floor, elbows on his knees, hands holding the Bible up in front of him.

Now, some decades later, I don’t remember any of the stories he told us. I don’t remember what Ezekiel did, or what Paul said, or even whether there was, or was not, a Malachi.

But I do remember that my Grandpa Hofer used to read me stories, and today, whenever I need to tell someone a story, I know I can channel my inner Grandpa Hofer and somehow his spirit will emerge, and I will remember how to tell a story.

That’s the thing about telling stories. People might not ever retell YOUR story. They might not even remember your story.

When you tell a story, you lose control over the content. A story is not some conveniently-wrapped package of information your audience is going to listen to, and digest, intact, exactly how you wanted them to. No matter how detailed or how vividly you tell that story, your audience is going to forget most of it. And therein lies the beauty of telling a story. When you tell a story, the forgetfulness of your audience is how your story becomes beautiful.

Telling a story is like giving someone a half-finished painting. Human nature being what it is, the listener wants to finish the painting. And so they think of their own grandpa, or their own cousin, or their own brother, or their own something from their past. And they take your half-finished painting and they finish it off with their own personality. They put their own stamp on it.

And then, because hearing stories stirs one’s own storytelling juices, they go forth and they tell other people their stories, which then become half-finished paintings of their own, and those other people put their own stamps on the new unfinished paintings. And pretty soon, the group has a bunch of paintings-in-progress floating around out there, paintings that bear the unique stamp of every single member of the group.

Members of the group can gaze at those paintings, like you would gaze into a mirror, and get a view of the group’s collective spirit they could not get if they stared at the group directly. Stories tell us who we are, and they do it in a way highly-logical bullet-pointed PowerPoint presentations never could. I don’t remember any of my grandpa’s stories, but I do have memories of a family dynamic that will stay with me until the day I die, and that’s one of the reasons we tell stories.