Anticipation

This Sunday is the kick-off of my church youth group, and I am a leader. I have never been a leader; I have been a part of youth group, but as a member, not a leader. And I’m only three years older than some of these kids. Part of me is scared to death about this. The other half is stepping back, saying “Take a deep breath, calm down, and pray.”

Well, I’m a Youth Group leader, right?

For the first set, we are doing The Gripping Point , about Craig DeMartino’s 96 ft fall and his life after it. It’s about pain, but more about why God allows pain. And it literally cut me straight to the heart when I started watching it in preparation.

When I first went to college, I stopped talking to God, because I felt He had betrayed me. My parents were getting a divorce and I was upset about that, and I was getting ready to leave home and it was just incredibly stressful. The two years following have been increasingly stressful with financial issues and a really bad break-up and just a thousand small things. To the point that my back and neck are stiff with emotional tramua and it’s really hurting me.

So pain and the “Why me, God?” is something I’m intimately familiar with. And knowing that, I think that I can stand before youth group and lead. By example.

“Take a deep breath, calm down, and pray.”

On Playing God

Expanding on the idea of writers as gods, I have to admit that when I am writing, I really do feel like a deity. When I sit and type out a story, I feel as if I am playing god. To the reality and characters that I have created, I am fate, destiny, the higher power; although I am not the same as the God of today’s religion. I am the god that has complete control of the world I rule over; I am a god that is a manipulator and puppet-master, pulling the strings.

In some way, that is a frightening god. A God who has complete control is a god who doesn’t allow for choice. But as an author, choice and free will are not things that I can give characters, because they do not act independently and can’t.

Also, my characters do not have faith or a belief in me. They don’t know that I exist and can’t pray or plead with me for their lives to go a certain way.

And yet, I hold their lives and their reactions in my hands. I decide what will happen in their lives, what they look like, where they lives, how they react. I am a god because I have complete control over their lives; it does not make me a good or benelovent god, but it still makes me a god.