January 2026

Pastor Message: 

Living Within God’s Story

One of the great privileges of my life as a pastor is listening to your stories. There are so many—some carefully held, others gently woven into daily life. Some bring laughter. Some appear ordinary at first, yet hold mystery beneath the surface. And many of them open a window into the heart.

Recently, Bob MacIntyre shared a story with me about a deer he saw on his way home after WARM choir practice. He said it was one of the largest bucks he had ever seen—near Red Mill, across from Nelson Park—standing there in the darkness of the night. As he told the story, I could feel his sense of wonder and excitement. He described it as a fifteen-point buck. I have to admit, I don’t really know how deer are measured by points, and I couldn’t quite picture the deer myself. But I could see it clearly through his eyes.

I’m not entirely sure why that story stayed with me, but it did. Perhaps it was the wonder in his voice and the light in his eyes. Some people might respond, “Oh, I’ve seen bigger deer than that,” or, “Really? Are you sure?” But responses like those can unintentionally dismiss the heart of a story. They can silence the feeling the storyteller is trying to share.

I think the same thing can happen when we read the Bible. What is our first reaction when we hear the story of Mary’s pregnancy, of God becoming human in the baby Jesus, of his miracle stories, of his death—and even his resurrection? Often, we feel the need to sort it all out, to ask what is true, what can be proven, what evidence supports it, or how other passages might explain it.

But the Bible is not merely a collection of information or a book of self-proving arguments. It is a library of stories. Some are creation stories. Some are told as ancient history. Some come as religious law, others as lifelong wisdom, poetry, song, or letters written to struggling communities. I am deeply grateful for this richness and diversity. When we insist on reading Scripture from only one angle, we risk suffocating the mystery that lies beyond our understanding.

What stayed with me, again and again, was this reminder: we live within God’s story, and we are a community of stories. We witness and experience. We listen and tell. And through these stories, we come to know God—and one another—and ourselves more deeply.

There are moments in our shared life waiting to be noticed, stories waiting to be told. But they are easy to miss when our attention is pulled elsewhere—by loud voices, misleading rhetoric, dividing narratives, and the constant noise of the world.

Still, we are a people of stories. We read them. We remember them. We reflect them. We tell them. And I often wonder if that is why God created the world with words in the first place—because words have power. Stories have power. And when we share them, something holy can happen among us.

So I wonder: What story do you carry? What story do we, as the church, carry? And what story is God inviting us to tell?

In Wonder,

Rev. Hyunwoong Hwang