When U.S. figure skater Mirai Nagasu took the ice in the women’s short program on Tuesday night, the cameras moved to capture her parents. This is normal for figure skaters.

So, according to my oldest son, is the story that follows.

Nagasu’s parents, who run a small family restaurant in Southern California, had their tickets paid for to the Olympics by Panasonic. The Nagasus would not have made it otherwise. Their income was too limited, their circumstances too difficult. Mrs. Nagasu, you see, has thyroid cancer. And while Mom’s prognosis is reported as “good,” the treatments she began last fall and will continue after the Olympics add a certain weight to Mirai’s competitive efforts.

We’ll say what goes without saying: A medal would have special meaning for the Nagasu family. A clean bill of health would be more special still.

These are, despite my son’s rolling eyes, the kinds of narratives that bring the Olympics to life for the average viewer.

The average football fan—be that American football or European—follows the players weekly. The stories get told along the way. But the average Olympics fan checks in at the opening ceremony. For the athletes to spring to life, especially in sports where the whole of the competition spans only minutes (if that), the stories have to be told along the way. And sure enough, when the stories are told well, a nation falls in love with this athlete and that one.

Interestingly, the influence of the emerging church is similar. Increasingly, we are reminded, the narratives of God’s work in people’s lives must be told. Don’t look now, but this may be a call to bring back Testimony Night.

I get it.

If we filled our public readings of Scripture with extended passages from Leviticus and Romans, we’d learn for as long as we could stay awake. But in the same way that a reading of the standards for scoring in figure skating would make for awfully bad television, making such an approach to God’s Word standard fare would send us for the remote.

We need the stories of Scripture. They weave life into God’s Word. Do people always live as God wants? No, not even in the holiest of books. But there is learning in this.

Same for the stories of right now, of how God is doing His omnipotent thing in the lives of your neighbors and colleagues and fellow churchgoers. We feel almost embarrassed by this, like we are giving in to some kind of spiritual titillation. But the book of Acts is in the Bible for the same reason the book of Hebrews is. It has power. No, it is power—God’s power, breathed into the pages of The Book and breathed into the lives of His people for the purpose of revealing Himself.

I’m not prepared to argue whether figure skating is a sport (though I can tell you that that same son of mine has his own ideas!), but I am happy to say that the stories don’t bother me. They remind me that there is so much going on behind the scenes. It’s the difference between Testimony Night and a Greet Your Neighbor break.