I’ve been listening to more Garrison Keillor this week on the way to and from work. Yesterday morning, smack in the middle of a bunch of News from Lake Woebegon segments, he told the Christmas story. I sat enraptured for 10 minutes as he laid out the familiar narrative with his own unique style, and realized something about the nature of storytelling. It’s not the saying of something new that makes a story wonderful so much as it is the ability to make us hear the old things as if for the first time, to make them fresh again for us. The best preachers, the best songwriters, and the best storytellers all realized this long before I did.