"And he said, Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God: but to others in parables; that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand."
Luke 8:10
The whole idea of learning from parables seems to me to be similar to the admonition to "study it out in your mind" (D&C 9:8). They are an important teaching tool, but the meaning isn't immediately apparent. Parables / stories / fiction in this context isn't about deception, fantasy, or "unreality" even if there are aspects of the stories where you have to suspend belief. It is about finding the truths in stories that are designed specifically to magnify a principle so that it is easier to understand, if you approach the story trying to understand and work out the truth, but which can also blind people because of the inherent fictional nature of the parable. If we reject it as falsehood, then we miss the truth that is waiting underneath.
Perhaps we understand this better today because we have movies and novels that we can relate to, and apply to our lives. We might refer to a rule or law or way of living from a movie and adopt it for our own, despite the fact that the world presented in the movie is not our world or our society, or sometimes even our planet. We understand on some level that there can be valuable, worthy truths within fictional accounts.
For God's purposes, he can teach us in a myriad of ways, and his stories are one of them... but they can also hide truths that we aren't ready for, or that we fail to work out for ourselves. Today, let's commit the mental and spiritual effort to study some of God's stories and learn from them. He is always seeking to teach us, and the instant that we take the time to sit down with his word, plus a little patience, faith, and prayer, he will begin to show us things that we need to know, and he will continue to deepen our understandings as long as we continue to study and pray.