I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community. And as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle for me, it is sort of a splendid torch, which I’ve got hold of for a moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
~George Bernard Shaw

But Jesus didn’t stop with stories; he also gave us way to authenticate them. He told us that you tell whether a story is true by the lives of the people who tell it. You judge a story by its teller You will know them by their fruit, he said. A good tree bears good fruit, and a bad one bad fruit. If the people telling a story love each other and live together with depth and grace, then their story is true. If they don’t, then their story is silliness or worse. A good story enables people to lay down their lives for each other and become one.

~John Alexander, The Secular Squeeze, pg. 114.