Show Notes
In this episode, Derek reflects on habits, formation, and why returning to the practice of reading fiction has renewed his imagination, faith, and understanding of the gospel.
Two weeks into the new year, Derek offers a word of grace for those who may already feel discouraged by abandoned New Year’s resolutions. God’s mercy is deeper than our resolve—and lasting change is formed through habits, not willpower. Drawing on the difference between resolutions and habits, Derek reminds us that habits shape who we are becoming, not just what we do.
From there, the episode turns to a personal shift: after years of reading almost exclusively non-fiction including theology, Scripture, and church history, Derek has returned to reading novels. Inspired by Eugene Peterson’s encouragement that pastors and Christians would be well-served to read fiction, Derek shares six reasons why it matters for people of faith including:
- Scripture Is a Story
The Bible is not merely a collection of ideas but a unified narrative of creation, fall, redemption, and new creation. Fiction trains us to read Scripture as living story rather than disconnected facts.
- The Gospel Is a Story
Good news is always narrated. Fiction helps us grasp narrative logic with beginnings, middles, and endings, so we can hear the gospel as something that has happened, not merely instructions to follow.
- Stories Are Three-Dimensional
Fiction immerses us in character, motivation, struggle, and emotion, cultivating empathy and helping us understand the complexity of real human lives.
- Stories Shape Discipleship
Like Jesus’ parables, stories invite transformation rather than mere information. Fiction allows us to see grace, forgiveness, courage, and repentance embodied in lived experience.
- Everyone Has a Story
Human lives are narratives, not bullet points. Reading fiction trains us to listen well—to attend to nuance, pain, joy, and transformation in others.
- The Gospel Is Best Shared Through Our Story
We proclaim the good news not only through explanation but through witness—by telling what God has done in our lives. Fiction helps us inhabit and tell stories that resonate with truth.
Derek concludes by reflecting on how reading fiction, most recently The Lord of the Rings, has rekindled his imagination and deepened his engagement with Scripture. Fiction doesn’t replace Bible reading; it enriches it, helping us see more clearly the living story God is telling in the world and in our lives.
The episode closes with a reading from The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien, reminding us that some of the deepest truths are carried not by arguments, but by stories.
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Transcript
Welcome back to
Another episode of Peaceable and Kind.
I am your host, Derek Vreeland, and we are now two full weeks into January.
And I hope your 2026 is going well.
Well, and I’m glad that you’ve joined me for this episode.
If you are newt, peaceable in kind, we are sowing seeds of peace and kindness.
in a world of chaos.
And if you haven’t subscribed, let me invite you to do so right now on whatever podcast platform you’re listening to.
Subscribe and also leave a rating and review.
That helps other people find these episodes.
And I want to give you some encouragement today if you have failed.
At any of those resolutions that you made on New Year’s Eve, don’t beat yourself up.
God has more mercy and grace than we often think.
And honestly, as I’ve said before, habits are better than resolutions anyway
A couple of episodes ago, I talked about the habit that I have personally.
It’s a habit and tradition we have here in our church.
Of praying a psalm for the day that aligns itself with the day of the year
And I know this is a very complicated system.
And really, eventually, what I want to do is create a little prayer book that has my daily office lectionary readings.
and the entire 150 psalms in it.
And each psalm at the top will have the date.
So you can just go through a prayer book of the Psalms.
One day I will get to that.
Uh but uh until that day you have to do a little math because there are a hundred and fifty
Psalms, but there are 365 days of the year.
And so with that discrepancy, you have to do math.
Once you get to day 151 of the year, you start back over with Psalm 1.
But we don’t have to worry about the complications of doing math to pray a psalm for the day during the month of January, because on January 1st, we prayed Psalm 1.
And today is January fifteenth, and so we pray Psalm fifteen.
And prayed that this morning.
Psalm fifteen is a is a short psalm.
Opens with who may worship in your sanctuary, Lord, who may enter your presence on your holy hill.
I love this habit of not just reading a psalm or studying the psalms, but praying the psalms every day.
And to me, it’s better than a resolution because with the habits
If you miss a day, so if I miss a day of prayer and Bible reading, if I miss a day where I don’t pray a psalm, I don’t beat myself up.
I just pick up with the next psalm.
on the next day.
It’s like every day we get a fresh start.
And I thought about the difference between resolutions and habits and why I think
habits are better.
Resolutions rely on resolve.
That is an isolated
Act of the will aimed at changing behavior.
Resolutions are rooted in willpower
Where the habits are actually a form of training your heart
Forming your heart and habits are really aimed at changing you from the inside because if we change on the inside,
The overflow of that is changing on the outside.
A resolution says, I will do this every day.
Uh and it’s it’s given in sort of the resolute willpower, sheer effort
But a habit says, I will order my life in such a way that the action I want to do becomes natural.
The deep difference here is that resolutions pursue self-improvement while habits pursue inner transformation.
And I believe that this is what God is doing in and among us right now.
changing us on the inside, that inner transformation might change us on the outside.
That is how we live and act and behave in the world
So let go of those resolutions, pick up some some good habits, and if you want to grow in your faith in 2026, and I hope that you do,
If you want to grow and be more like Jesus, then develop some Jesus-centered habits.
And praying the Psalms is to me just one of those because.
For Jesus, the Psalms were his prayer book.
It was the prayer book of the ancient Jewish people.
It was the prayer book of the early church.
And it’s become my prayer book.
So pick up habits like praying the Psalms, and of course there’s many, many other habits.
If you want to become Christ-like, then pick up Christ-like habits.
And speaking of habits, I want to talk today about a habit that I’ve recently resumed.
And that is the habit of reading fiction.
For most of my adult life, reading has been a part of what I do.
I can barely remember a time when I didn’t have a book to read
I can’t remember as an adult a time, maybe early in college, because you know, you’re in school and you’re reading what’s assigned to you, but once I got into seminary and then the twenty five plus years of been a pastor, I can’t think of a time
that I wasn’t finishing up a book, starting a new book, or in the middle of a book.
But my reading for 30 years has primarily been nonfiction.
Reading theology, reading church history, Bible studies, spiritual formation books, commentaries, and the like.
Um, I have a number of friends in ministry who keep writing great books, and I want to read their books, I want to read all the books that come out.
And so I feel like I haven’t had time to get to nonfiction.
Plus, as an author myself, I’m
I’m always reading and researching the next book that I’m writing.
I’ve been doing that for well over a year.
And so the idea of sitting down to read a novel.
to read a good piece of fiction just seemed like a luxury.
But recently something shifted in my heart
A voice from the past began to echo in my heart and mind, and that was the voice of Eugene Peterson
I have talked on previous episodes about how much I love Eugene and how he has influenced me through
his writings.
He he really is uh my chief pastoral mentor.
And I recently recalled
Eugene Peterson talking about the importance of reading fiction.
It was at a pastors gathering in the Colorado Rockies.
back in 2009, some 17 years ago.
And I was honored to participate in that pastors gathering.
I got to interview Eugene in one of the sessions and
Spend time with him talking, but I remember in one of those sessions, he talked with great passion about how novels shape our imagination.
He talked about how stories help us read the Bible as a story and preach the gospel as a story.
He said that theology is important, but as pastors serving a congregation, what the people need are the stories
And he talked about his own personal life, that while he was a pastor and because he was writing and pastoring all at the same time, he he talked about the reading of novels shaping
his life as a pastor and an author.
And as someone who’s read numerous, numerous.
I can’t say I’ve read all of Eugene’s books, but I’ve read more than 20 of them.
You can see how much novels and story and narrative and fiction have shaped him
So after that conference in 2009 and into twenty ten, I started reading a lot of fiction.
I started with Wendell Berry because Eugene Peterson talked about how important Wendell Berry was for him.
And I love Wendellberry.
I I haven’t read Wendellberry in a number of years.
And now that I’m resuming reading fiction, I need to, I need to get back to Wendellberry.
Well, okay, so back to 2009, I’m in this conference with Eugene Peterson.
I’m hearing him talk about the importance of pastors reading fiction, and so I start.
But I hate to say that my fiction reading has slowed way down.
And for a long time, I haven’t regularly
read fiction, and so I’m happy to say that something has changed.
In the season of Advent, just last December
I started reading my very first reading of The Lord of the Rings.
So years ago, maybe seven or eight years ago, I asked for a really nice box set of the Lord of the Rings, hardcover box set, really nice set.
of the Lord of the Rings, and I received it.
And it has sat on my shelf for years and years and years.
And I have wanted to read it, but I I just I didn’t want to start and not be able to finish.
It’s six books in three volumes.
And if you put all three volumes together, I mean it’s 1,100, 1200 pages.
And I haven’t wanted to start it if I couldn’t finish.
So I started last month and here in January I’m still going strong.
I’m in the second volume now, the two towers, and I’m really loving it and
Reading the Lord of the Rings has recharged my desire to read fiction
And so I want to give you six quick reasons why I think you should read fiction as a follower of Jesus, whether you’re a pastor or not.
I think you will find it valuable in reading fiction.
Let me give you six reasons.
First, scripture itself is a story.
Remember that the Bible is not a single book.
The Bible is a collection of books
The Bible contains poetry and letters and wisdom and law and history
But at its core, the Bible is telling one big story
From Genesis to Revelation.
So even though there’s different kinds of literature, there’s different kinds of writing
I mean, the Psalms, for example, is not the same kind of writing as Paul’s letter to the Romans.
So we read each of the individual books of the Bible within their own genre.
And you know, you don’t read everything the same.
You don’t read, for example, a text message the same way as you would read a letter.
uh from a friend.
Now, I know we don’t really write letters anymore, but if you get a letter from a friend, right, you’re not gonna read that letter the same way you read a text message.
You’re not gonna read a book of poetry
The same way as you read the menu at a restaurant.
There’s different kinds of reading based on the kind of genre or literature.
So there’s different books of the Bible, but it is telling one story.
It’s the story of creation, corruption, covenant, Christ, and new creation.
So
From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible has a grand narrative arc from creation to new creation.
And when we only read nonfiction, where we get a list of ideas and principles and doctrines, which again is important.
We miss the texture of story, character development, conflict, emotion, the narrative arc
Eugene Peterson has said that every text has a texture.
Words, both in nonfiction and fiction, have a feel to them.
But for me, it is easier to get the feeling of a text in fiction
I have to pause this episode for just a moment to tell you that the next two Bible studies in the God and the Neighborhood Bible study series are available for pre-order.
Crucifixion
Eight lessons on how God saves us and resurrection.
Eight lessons on how God restores us.
Both release on February 17th, just in time for Lent and Easter.
Pre-ordered.
now links are in the show notes.
So reading fiction trains us to pay attention to story
It reminds us that stories are important.
Reading is not just for receiving information
But reading story is a way of shaping our imagination around the things that matter most.
And without imagination, we might mistakenly read the Bible as just a series of God facts.
Instead of reading the Bible as a living story that invites us in.
So one way to think about it is that fiction forms within us
a story-soaked imagination, one that helps us join in God’s story rather than merely extracting information from it.
So we start there.
I think reading fiction is important because the Bible itself is a story.
Secondly, the gospel is a story.
The gospel is not a set of propositions or axioms
The gospel is good news, and news is told in story form.
Now, the Bible has this big overarching story, and the climax of the story of Scripture is the story of Jesus, which is the gospel.
Now, you may have heard the saying from St.
Francis Assisi, preach the gospel at all times and use words as necessary.
And I get what he’s saying.
We do live in obedience to the gospel because the gospel is a story of Jesus, our saving King.
And there is an obedience to King Jesus.
So there is some obedience in the gospel so that as we’re living out the gospel, we ourselves become sort of a Bible that people can know and read.
But to to give an an alternative perspective on the Assisi quote
You cannot preach the gospel without words.
You need words because in order to tell a story,
There has to be words.
I mean you can’t pantomime a story.
I mean, you see these mimes and you can kind of tell what they’re doing.
You know, they’re stuck in a box.
They’re pulling a rope.
Uh, but you can’t tell a full story by pantomime alone.
You have to use words.
So to say that Jesus is Lord,
Or to say that the kingdom has come is an announcement that requires a story.
There is a series of events that have led to this moment.
And there is something about the coming of King Jesus that affects how the world is shaped and reshaped and how we live.
And so the very essence of the gospel, Jesus is Lord, that requires a story, a backstory
That leads us to the moment of that declaration and then a story of how that’s lived out.
And so reading fiction
Trains us in a maybe I would call it a narrative logic where we understand reality with beginnings, middles, and endings
So when we hear the gospel, we are ready to receive it as good news that unfolds in our own lives.
Uh and that’s a better way, I think, of hearing the gospel, instead of hearing the gospel as simply a way to get your sins forgiven and go to heaven when you die, and then you can wash your hands of it and move on.
When you hear the gospel as a story, it beckons you to enter into that story and to be transformed by that story.
Third, stories are three-dimensional.
Now, nonfiction can be incredibly rich
I’ve only and have exclusively written nonfiction books and Bible studies that I do hope people have found to be rewarding and substantive and rich
But nonfiction books contain propositions and principles that at times can land flat.
They’re true principles and propositions, but they’re without texture.
They’re colorless.
And so in reading good fiction, in reading a good story, we encounter subtlety.
and motivation and struggle and conflict and perspective and emotion, you know, the stuff of real life
And fiction has a way of adding color and life to the principles and propositions of truth that we hold dear.
And for me, a really, really good story has really good character development
And so we get to experience not just what the characters are doing, but the interior life of characters.
We
We see characters and how they respond under pressure and how relationships shape their decisions and how context matters.
So that kind of relational depth that you see in fiction, that’s a kind of three-dimensional human texture
And it is inviting.
That’s what a good story does.
It invites you.
A good story is one in which you can’t put the book down because you want to know what’s happening next
Fourth, stories capture and communicate for me the heart of discipleship
As I read fiction, I often see the teachings of Jesus play out in vivid ways that I never fully have grasped before
When I see characters embodying grace or forgiveness, betrayal, and how they respond to betrayal.
You see courage in the heart of characters.
You see loyalty and transformation and mercy.
Stories don’t teach discipleship like a textbook.
They invite you into discipleship the way Jesus invited his first followers into a relationship.
In a really good story, you can see the life of Jesus, you can see discipleship, and it’s not in a flat
boring lecture, but it’s in the brightness and the full color, the full humanity of story.
And of course, you know, Jesus himself taught with stories
The parables that Jesus taught were not pithy little illustrations of a point
The parables of Jesus, that was the way he preached the gospel of the kingdom.
Every parable of Jesus
Is in some way a kingdom announcement, what it looks like to be a kingdom citizen, how to respond to the kingdom.
Which is God’s rule and reign.
Remember again, the gospel is the announcement that Jesus is Lord, that Jesus is King, that He’s ruling and reigning.
Our response to the gospel is to confess and repent of our sin, to turn away from sin and turn to King Jesus in allegiant obedience.
And so the gospel of salvation and the gospel of the kingdom are synonymous terms
And so a part of our ongoing response to the gospel is discipleship.
And I can see aspects of discipleship throughout really good novels and stories.
Fifth, everyone has a story.
Every person’s life cannot be fully captured in a list of facts or dates
A story holds on to the arc of life.
Again, beginnings, middles, and endings, right?
In
the story of anyone’s life, there are these twists and turns, there are setbacks and failures, there’s victory, there’s pain and celebration, there’s transformation.
You yourself have a story.
So if we’ve never met before, if we were to meet up at a coffee shop and I’m meeting you for the first time,
The first thing I would say to you is tell me your story.
We really are
the stories that we tell.
If I want to get to know you, I don’t need the facts or information about you, right?
So you could tell me your age.
your height, your weight, your eye color, your hair color, your place of birth, the name of your mom and dad.
Right?
You can give me information about you, but that isn’t really
Allow me to see who you are.
If I want to get to know your your heart, your character
I need to know something about you, and the way you talk about yourself is by telling your story.
And some people will say, well, my story isn’t that exciting.
And
Twenty-five years as a pastor has shown me that everyone has an interesting story
The details of your story may not be as dramatic as other people, but I love hearing people’s story.
Everyone has a story.
Your life is an unfolding story, and God is the master editor.
God is still at work editing and reshaping your story.
And if you stick close to Jesus, I can promise you your story is going to have a happy and a good end.
So as we read good fiction, good novels, it sharpens our capacity to hear and appreciate the stories of other people.
It has certainly helped me to sit with people in their complexity and to recognize that most regular lives
Don’t fit into a cookie cutter with nice tidy bullet points.
Fiction trains us to pay attention
to the stories, to the nuance, and yes, to the depth of the stories of other people
Finally, number six, the best way to tell the gospel story is through our own story.
As followers of Jesus, we are called to proclaim the good news to all creation.
But we don’t have to memorize a set of Bible verses or teaching points as related to the gospel in order to share the gospel.
The best way I have found to share the gospel is simply to share our own story, the story of what God has done for us.
When you tell that story, you’re able to weave the gospel story into your own story.
You can talk about how you first went back to church or how you first became aware.
of Jesus and his kingdom and the story of Scripture.
And then at some point you responded.
You said yes to Jesus.
And now that you have become a follower of Jesus, this is how your life is different
If you just tell your own story, that’s the best way to tell the gospel story.
So why did I start reading fiction again?
It’s not because fiction is merely entertaining, and it is, I am finding the Lord of the Rings to be
Very entertaining.
I’m often reading at night.
And sometimes when I wake up in the morning, it’s the first thing I’m thinking about.
Sometimes I’ve read
first thing in the morning.
I’m trying to read 15 pages a day in Lord of the Rings.
And so I’ll read at night and then sometimes I’ll wake up in the morning like, I gotta do my 15 pages now because I’m thinking about how that chapter ended.
And
curious how things are gonna proceed in the story.
But I’m not reading fiction again simply for entertainment
I believe that reading fiction is training my imagination.
And let me add that reading fiction
doesn’t replace Bible reading.
I’m still doing my daily Bible reading while reading fiction, but I will say that reading fiction, it really has
enriched my reading of the scripture, particularly when I’m in narrative portions of the Bible
Fiction, it forms us in ways that nonfiction alone does not.
And
So what I want to do here at the end of this episode is I want to share a little bit from Tolkien’s first volume in The Lord of the Rings.
I want to share just a little bit from The Fellowship of the Ring.
Which is volume one.
And as I was preparing for this episode, I went through and I narrowed it down to five passages, and then I narrowed it down to three passages.
And because I don’t want this episode to be an hour long, I’ve decided just to share one passage with you
And it is a longer passage, but I want to read it to you.
And by the way, if you don’t know the entire story arc of The Lord of the Rings.
It will be a little confusing for you, but I want to read a passage that is a couple of paragraphs, so it’s a longer-ish reading.
But I want you to see some of the texture of this text.
So let’s look at this passage together.
And for the sake of context and not giving away too much of the story, let me just share that this passage is in the chapter called Lothlorien.
And it is when the fellowship, which is made up of four hobbits, two men, a dwarf and an elf.
And of course, right there, it would take it would take a whole episode to explain all these characters.
And I assume down the road I’m gonna do one, if not multiple, Lord of the Rings episodes.
because that’s what I’m reading these days.
Uh but this company, they are traveling and they have made it to a city of elves.
And elves in Tolkien’s world of Middle-earth are the wisest and the most noblest of all the creatures of Middle-earth
I kind of read it as a Christian.
I kind of read the Elves a little bit like angels.
And so they’ve made it to La Florien, and uh there they meet the Elves there.
And I just want to jump in without giving any other context.
So you’re gonna meet Hal Deer.
He was an elf that the fellowship met in the woods.
just outside of La Florian.
But just listen to the words.
Again, this is really out of context in my copy of The Fellowship of the Ring.
This is page 363.
So there’s a lot that’s happened before this.
But just listen and get a feel for the texture of these words.
I’m going to jump right in.
Happy folk are hobbits to dwell near the shores of the sea, said Haldeer.
It is long indeed since any of my folk have looked on it, yet still we remember it in song
Tell me of these havens as we walk.
I cannot, said Mary.
I have never seen them
I have never been out of my own land before, and if I had known what the world outside was like, I don’t think I should have had the heart to leave it.
Not even to see fair Lothlorean, said Haldir, The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places, but still there is much that is fair
and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, grows perhaps the greater.
Some there are among us who sing that the shadow will draw back, and peace shall come again.
Yet I do not believe that the world about us will ever again be as it was of old, or the light of the sun as it were aforetime
For the elves, I fear, it will prove at best a truce, in which they may pass to the sea unhindered
and leave the middle earth forever.
Alas for Lothlorin that I love, it would be a poor life in a land where no maulorn grew.
But if there are Marlorn trees beyond the Great Sea, none have reported it.
As they spoke thus, the company filed slowly along the paths in the wood,
led by How deer, while the other elf walked behind.
They felt the ground beneath their feet smooth and soft
and after a while they walked more freely without fear or hurt or fall.
Being deprived of sight, Frodo found his hearing and other senses sharpened
He could smell the trees and the trodden grass.
He could hear many different notes in the rustle of the leaves overhead.
the rivers murmuring away on his right, and the thin, clear voices of birds in the sky.
He felt the sun upon his face, and hands when they passed through an open gate.
As soon as he set foot upon the far bank of Silverload, a strange feeling had come upon him.
and it deepened as he walked on into the naith.
It seemed to him that he had stepped over a bridge of time
into a corner of the elder days, and was now walking in a world that was no more.
In Rivendale there was memory of ancient things
In Lorien, the ancient things still lived on in the waking world.
Evil had been seen and heard there.
Sorrow had been known
The elves feared and distrusted the outside world.
Wolves were howling on the wood’s borders, but on the land of Lorien no shadow lay
What a beautiful passage.
Just reading that again, I’m captured by the imagination of this elfish
town, Lothlorean, and how it is described as the the waking world
Tolkien writes here that in Lorien the ancient things still lived on in the waking world.
There was a sense in which the elves were awake and alert.
And the ancient things, this speaks of the elder days.
This is before the.
the growing shadow of Sauron, who is the the dark character, the bad guy in The Lord of the Rings, before his strength had grown when
elves and men and dwarves all all live together in peace.
Anyway, I will certainly do one, if not more, episodes on
uh the Lord of the Rings because I’m enjoying it so much.
And even if you’re not a fan of Tolkien or have even read The Lord of the Rings before, maybe this little passage.
and the richness of the description might encourage you to pick up a novel of some kind
And I would certainly encourage you to do that.
As you are reading, work some fiction in there, some really good novels and stories.
And The Lord of the Rings is an epic tale, a very, very long three-volume series.
But if you want to know what to read, reach out to me on social media.
I am at Derek Vreeland in all the places on Threads, on Blue Sky, on Instagram, Facebook.
on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
You can find me there and all my social accounts are in the show notes.
But reach out to me
If you want some suggestions on good stories to read, I’d love to share that with you.
Well, thank you for joining me for this episode.
This is all that I have for you today.
Go in peace and be kind.
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.