Today we're going to start another new adventure. You get to write your first visual narratives. These are stories written from the perspective of one of the characters that's in the Bible that was there when it happened. And the reason we do narratives is to write about someone you have to think like them. You have to put yourself in their shoes. You have to feel what they feel. And when you do that, you identify with them. You connect what you've experienced to what they're experiencing. And that's what our goal is to connect with the Bible with your emotional brain. So when you look at Peter in the boat or you look at Thomas Dowding or you look at Jesus spending the night in prayer, you can think, oh, this I get this because this is like something that you've been through. So some of you, when the first time you hear that we're going to be writing, you're already freaking out and going, oh shoot, I hate writing. Well, I got good news for you. This is not going to be like what you did in school. First of all, nobody's going to see, you don't have to turn your paper in. Nobody's going to see it. You're the only one who's going to read it. There's no grades. There's no grammar, not see stuff. We're just going to do the fun parts of writing. So the process we use is called free writing. It's an exercise author's use. And what that means is you just start writing. You don't try to plan everything. You don't make an outline. You don't, you know, take two hours and think it all through in your mind. You just, you take an idea and you just start to write. And what happens when you do that is you get into the character and start thinking like the character, you know, John comes to a village and he's going to preach his first sermon. Well, you know, what would I do if I had to preach my first sermon? Well, maybe I go over and grab somebody out of the crowd and I talk to him and I say, you know, what's going on? So you write that little conversation. You know, who are, who are the influential people in this town? Oh, that guy over there. So that's how your story develops is you just put yourself in the character shoes and walk through the events. So here's just five simple steps for the process. First thing you're going to do, you pick a character. You can be one of the people that is written in the Bible or like for instance when Jesus sends the 12, he picked the 12 out of a larger group of disciples. So there's other people there. You could be one of those other people. You could be a wife when they get to the village and stay in somebody's home. You can be the woman whose home that is that two of the disciples are staying in. You could be a child sitting on the wall watching them walk into town. You can make up a character as long as it gives you a real realistic perspective on the story. So you choose a character number one, number two, find a quiet place where you're not disturbed and set yourself a timer for one hour. You only take one hour on this when the hour is over you're finished. So this is not a oh my gosh I have to generate a five-page paper. This is you just sit down, take an idea and write, and when an hour is over they think things and you're done. And if your story is not done you're still done because we want to have reasonable limits on this. So pick a character, get a spot, pick one idea to write about. Maybe your idea is you know the story is the stilling of the storm and they're out on this boat pitching around in the waves. Maybe you want to write about the disciples being seasick. Maybe you want to write about one of the disciples whose can't swim and lives 25 miles you know a whole day's walk from the nearest body of water. You can do that. But pick one idea to write about and then you just start writing. So if you're writing about seasickness maybe you just start right there in the boat. Peter was wretching over the gun whale and then just take off from there. Since these are visual narratives you can there's a couple things you can focus on. You can write about what you see. If you are watching you know Nathaniel puke over the side of the boat. What do you see? What do you feel? What do you hear? Is the wind singing in the rigging? Do you feel cold water hitting your skin? Write those details and be visual about it. You can write emotions. Nathaniel felt sick and woozy and however you feel when you're going to throw up. You can write that kind of thing. But try to create something so that when we hear it we're in the scene with you. We can see it. We can feel it. So just write and when the hours up you're done. So those are all the directions that you got. And then when we get back together for our third session on the passage we'll read our stories to each other. So as long as you can read your own writing you're fine. You don't have to spell check. You don't have to grammar check. Don't go back and edit what you've written because that's a whole with no bottom. Don't go back and try to massage your pros and make it sound good. Just get the story out on paper and then you'll write it and we'll share about how it touched us. And it's an incredible experience to hear these different narratives. There's on the website like a human being.com. If you go down to the bottom there's a page of narrative tools. And it has fun things like here's the 10 most common women's names and men's names in Palestine and Jesus' day. Here's where you can find sunrise and sunset times. Here's weather information. Here's the kind of nicknames they used. So there's a bunch of little tools there. You might want to check out that will help you make your story more realistic. And the end product of this is when you put yourself into writing about one of these people you will probably always remember whenever you come back to this passage in the future you'll remember something that you wrote or someone else wrote about this person in the story. And it will really stick with you because it's touched your emotional brain and things that touch there really stick with us.