I am sitting in a nondescript church fellowship hall, attending a gathering of the church’s youth group. Over the next hour, three people—a man in his fifties, a woman in her early thirties, a boy in tenth grade—get up and tell stories. Their stories all are in response to the same text—Matthew 19:16–30, the story of the rich young ruler—and the same prompt, “Tell about a time when the good was a difficult or confusing surprise.” Read the rest