You know how we restore furniture, books, photos, paintings, cars, houses, land, water—even our hair?  What if there was a way to restore what is eroded away by our culture, the stuff of life, sin, and self?  What if there was something you and I could do that restored our story?

There is.  It’s all about story.  If I had the way or means I would pass out a prescription for all people that would read something like this:

Take one restoring story per day.  Results are best when

consumed in large quantities and shared in community.

Jesus used a prescription like this.  Wherever and whenever He spent time with His creation, He told stories.  They were stories that encouraged, enlightened, convicted, taught, and pursued the listener.  They were stories that restored a person.  Jesus reached into their lives with a strong narrative, dialogue and descriptive and He re-storied them!

An excerpt from Step Inside… Where Stories Come To Life:

Excerpts from Step Inside

Biography:

“Restoration through story,” Melea will tell you, “is my heart’s joy and it’s my work.  I’m a storyteller. In any gathering, where we can center on this form of oral storytelling, there is the greatest potential for a change in our story.  The change could be as monumental as the realization that my pain is similar to the main character’s pain or as simple as feeling better because listening to a story has allowed me to laugh and relax, to take a breath.”

For 20 years Melea J. Brock has been crafting tales, collecting them like a banker and then, at just the right time, spending them on gatherings of adults, children, women, young adults, teenagers and her favorite—multi-generational gatherings. 

Melea began storytelling while serving as an assistant dean at a small Christian college in Southern California. Her education in Social Work and masters in Higher Education had prepared her well for the tasks of dean work, but it was her theatre arts background that provided the means of storytelling as a way to guide and instruct students. The more amazing discovery was that the use of story was providing much more than an entertaining teaching style. She discovered that by using storytelling, her students were retaining information and finding a guide for their own story as she counseled and mentored them. 

Melea began crafting her own oral stories, along with gathering folktales, fairy tales and true-life stories.  Her repertoire was growing and so were the audiences outside of her work as a dean.  In 1989 she began her ministry called Right-Side-Up Stories and produced her first audio collection appropriately entitled Right-Side-Up Stories for Upside-Down People.

Her storytelling has taken her across the United States and into Canada, Israel—to schools, churches, colleges and businesses.  She has shared her stories in large venues such as conferences concerts and small intimate settings such as living rooms and sides of hospital beds.

Melea has also done some vicarious travel into other countries such as Holland, Germany, France, England, the Philippines, China and Israel.  She began traveling when she began producing more audio products and small portable paperback collections of her original tales in 1998.  Now others began to use her stories in their churches, schools, drama teams and family and relationships all around the world.

“One of my joys in the publishing of my stories has been hearing of how stories such as “The King Who Waits”, “The Sack” or “The Fountain,” have been translated into another language, and that the same impact is there.  That’s more than me—that’s the power of a story!”

Melea makes her home in Southern California.  She boasts of more creative work in the role of mom and wife to her husband, David, and children—Tim and Grace. She and her husband host bible studies, prayer groups, young adults, and artistic gatherings in a very large 4-door garage that sits on what is a former U.S. Forestry property they call home.  This large garage is also home to the Right-Side-Up Stories studio.  “Reclaiming this property with its old cottages and this 1930s utility garage is just another part of that restoration thing that we, as a family, love to do and live out in everyday ways.”