I thought that I was finished answering letters from Anita Padgett’s eighth-graders at The King’s Academy, but then I ran across J.R.’s letter. J writes, “I have been effected by this novel [Chataine’s Guardian] greatly, mostly because you show Roman, even though he had a rough childhood, he still remains strong in God. And it shows me how I need to act toward others and even though I’m mad or upset that Jesus is always there to calm me down.” I can’t remark enough upon how these teens seize on the essence of Christianity. Whether it’s their upbringing (which is likely), their role models, or their youthful idealism, they get that our faith is expressed in how we treat other people, especially those who mean nothing to us. Anyway, I sense a kindred spirit in J, in that dealing with bottled-up anger has been one of my biggest struggles. God provides many kinds of help when we ask, and what He provided for me was fiction. Many people have noted the cathartic value of writing in dealing with grief; let me tell you how effectively it drains away anger. I’m still not sure how it works, except that I employ the plotting technique advised by the creator of the Hardy Boys mystery series: “Get your hero into a pit,” he said, “and then throw rocks at him.” So I subject my protagonists to the most stressful, unfair situations that my genres allow, then sit back and say, “Now what are you going to do?” What they do is “work out their own salvation with fear and trembling”; that is, they do the right thing as best they can, and let the situation resolve itself under the laws of Divine Omniscience. By the time I’ve gotten them to that point, I’m pretty well subdued. Speaking of writing, there is one more letter I’m going to answer: that from writer C.McC., whose chapter excerpts somehow got separated from the sketches. The drawings wound up at the top of the stack while the excerpts stayed at the bottom. I’m going to read these over carefully and then reply in a few days.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Aug 2013 17:09:49 +0000
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