God: The Original Author; Editing

More thoughts.

To all writers out there: What’s the absolute worst part of writing? I’d bet money most, if not all, of you said ‘editing’.  Editing sucks.  It’s slow and painful and tedious and time consuming.  When a story goes truly bad, you don’t bother trying to fix it sometimes.  You just scrap the page or scene or chapter or draft and start again.

Our story went very bad.  Horribly bad.  Not only did it not go the way God wanted it to go, it went in the exact opposite direction.

Imagine this happening to your story.  Your perfect main characters decide that they’re going to break the one rule you’ve given them, and the proceed to rewrite your story, corrupting the plotline beyond recognition and adding terrible elements that weren’t supposed to be there.

I know what I would do.  File > New Document.  Start over.  Blank slate, maybe this time I can write Eve to be smarter so she doesn’t believe the snake, or maybe I’ll just write the snake out altogether.  Maybe I’ll just not give my characters free will, so they have to be little boring robots that only do what I say.

That’s not what God did.  He looked down on us, sighed, and got out His cosmic red pen and highlighter.  Then He painstakingly went through, trying to guide our story back on course.  He went through the painstaking work of undoing all the damage that hand been done to His world.

As newspaper columnist Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith said, “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”  And that’s exactly what God did.  He opened His veins, literally, dying on Calvary to fix the errors in the story.

God: The Original Author; Fractured Creation

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Well, first of all, they don’t. It only happened once, and He volunteered.  But aside from that, let’s look at what people typically mean and try to answer that.

Bad things happen. They do. War. Crime. Poverty. Disease. Famine. Rape. Domestic abuse. Child abuse. So much that people cry out to God, “How could you let this happen?” Atheists point accusing fingers at people of faith, saying, “If your God was really a God of Love, He would stop all this!”

You know what? He wants to. He didn’t create any of this, in His Eden. He created a perfect world. An unbroken creation. A perfect manuscript. And what did we do? We tore it apart. We took God’s manuscript and ripped it to shreds, scattering the pieces and rearranging them.

We tried to make our own story. Thing is, we’re not qualified to. We don’t know everything about the Present, much less the Past or the future. We don’t know everything about ourselves, much less everything and everyone else. There is no way we could write a story.

So our world is wrong. Like a giant jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces mashed together in the wrong order. The picture doesn’t make sense, and there are cracks in it. Cracks that let things God never wanted in His story to slip in. Sin.

And we can’t fix it on our own.  We’re still not good enough. Only if everyone surrenders completely to the Author and lets Him finish His story.

God: The Original Author; More Thoughts

These are some more thoughts I had about how this idea of God as the Author makes a lot of sense and is cool.

One thing I thought of that didn’t go into the posts is the very method God uses to create. Words. He speaks, and it is so. This lends a strong argument to my belief that words are powerful. Hence, I don’t (or rather, try not to. I’m far from perfect, yet) curse or insult people profusely, like I hear my fellow students doing. The pen is mightier than the sword, but a word doesn’t have to be written down to be dangerously powerful.

Another thing is, this is a good way to explain why there is evil in the world.  When was the last time you read a story, a really good story, where the characters had absolutely no challenges, and everything went well, and everyone was nice, and they all got along and lived happily ever after.

*gives you a few moments to wrack your brains*

There aren’t any. Because characters drive the story, and characters can only grow through hardship.  God doesn’t cause bad things to happen.  They’re just part of the story.

And another thing. God loves everybody. He wrote us. He took nothing and made it a person and gave it a unique personality that He loves. Even the villains.  Even the most horrific villains have some attachment to their author, because their author made them.

So everyone who’s addicted to something or who has made terrible mistakes, I have two things to say. One, God knows. Just because you don’t tell him doesn’t mean He doesn’t know. He wrote you. He knew what was going to happen before it happened.  So all the times you say, “Oh, He doesn’t know what I’ve done,” or “It’s too terrible, He can’t forgive me,” forget it. It’s crap.

Because, second thing I have to say, He loves you. It doesn’t matter what you did, God’s seen it, and is willing to forgive you if you just ask in the name of His Son, because He loves you. You’re His creation.

Yet another point: Satan is not the equal opposite of God. God is the author and Satan is a character. In my posts I described Jesus as the main character, though that’s not entirely accurate. It’s more like Jesus the man was the main character, if you could separate him from Jesus, the Son of God.

Anyway. Point is, Satan is not a threat to God at all. When my author friends and I are Role Playing our characters, and one of the villains does something out of line with our plans, one of us will call out, ‘Author powers’, and smite them. Annoying, sometimes. A threat, never.

There may be still more thoughts. We’ll see. Later, wyrms.

Movie Review: The Encounter

Sometimes, low-budget films suck.  I’ll just start with that.  They do, sometimes.  There are, however, exceptions.  Like this movie I just watched, called The Encounter.

Synopsis?  Five strangers on an abandoned country back road in the middle of a storm find that the road is flooded.  They suggest waiting at the diner they passed a few miles back, which officer DeVille, who told them that the road is impassable, insists doesn’t exist.

At this diner, they meet a man whose nametag reads ‘Jesus’.

Nick: “Hay-zeus!”

Jesus: “Most people pronounce it ‘Gee-sus.”

It was very funny.

So he knows everything about them, and it feels very creepy for all of them.  And I can’t tell you any more without spoiling it, so I’ll just tell you what I thought of it.

It was a very good movie.  Of course, it’s not going to win any Oscars for acting or special effects, but the writing was excellent and the message was amazing.

Also! There were some really cool phrases and whatnot that you’ll probably hear me mention in later posts.

Five out of five for content and five out of five for delivery.  Go watch it.

Imdb: The Encounter

Amazon: The Encounter

God: The Original Author; Part Three: Letting the Characters Live

So God is in the Garden of Eden with His characters, Adam and Eve.  Like any Author, He enjoys being with His characters and they revere him as the giver of life, as they should.  God gives them free will, and sets a few simple rules.  One rule, actually.  Don’t touch this tree.

Enter our story’s antagonist.  Satan.  The deceiver.  The fallen angel of light.  “Oh, no, you won’t die.  You’ll get better!”  And so the apple is eaten.  This is the Inciting Incident.  This is why we need a hero.

Fast forward a few thousand years to a little insignificant town called Bethlehem.  In a small room crowded with animals, a teenage virgin gives birth.  The child is called Emmanuel, ‘God with us’.  Embracing Destiny.  We needed a hero, so He came.

Another thirty or so years later, the child has become a man, Jesus. He’s been spreading the Good News and performing miracles.  The people in power don’t like that.  They kill Him.  Not only do they kill Him, but first they scourge Him beyond recognition, to the point where you can see His spine.

Then they kill Him by crucifixion. The single most painful way to die that has yet been invented. In the moment of His death, the ground shakes and the sky goes dark.  Satan, it seems, has won.  God died.  It truly was The Black Moment.

Three days later.  The tomb is empty.  Death has been overcome.  Christ Jesus is alive, and rejoins his disciples.  He ascends into Heaven to be with His father.  This is the Climax.  The Showdown.

What does this mean for us?  It means that all we have left is the Denouement.  The Resolution.  The Showdown has already been fought, and won.  The Kingdom is secure.  Christ is the Lord of the Universe.  All we have to do is surrender to Him and let Him use us to bring more people to Himself.

And that, wyrms, that is pretty amazing.

God: The Original Author; Part Two: Creating the Story

So I’ve established that God is the only Author to every create a truly original story. Then I looked at how He did it.

On the first day of Writing, He came up with the raw materials: matter and energy. Then He brought order to the energy by separating the light from the dark, creating the day and the night.

In verse six, the second day of Writing began. In the second and third days, God shaped the world in which He would write his story, creating the sea and the sky, and pulling the land up out of the water and causing plants to grow.

In verse fourteen, the fourth day begins, and God gives a source to the light by creating the sun and the moon and setting up the orbit of the world, that we can have seasons and days.

Then comes one of my favorite verses in the Bible, one of the most concise, potent declarations of God’s ultimate power. Our Author just spent fifteen verses and four days making our world, shaping it carefully. In the second half of verse sixteen, it says, “He made the stars also.”

‘The stars’. The rest of the entire universe, which we have only seen a tiny fraction of, and only understand an even smaller fraction of, was little more than an afterthought to the Author. His story came first. His characters and their world came first.

In the fifth and sixth days, the Author populated His world with life.  Fish and birds came first, followed on day six by the land animals.

Then, in the second half of day six, God creates his character.  He spends six verses on the creation of man in this first chapter, the same amount of time all other animals combined had spent on them, and that’s not all. The Author spent all of chapter two describing man and his purpose.

He creates Adam and breathes life into him, giving him very simple instructions, and then creates a companion for him. Being the best Author, He spends more time on His characters than on anything else.

The world is made. The characters are in place, and the plot of the story is clear in the Author’s mind. Tomorrow I’ll talk about how that story unfolded, and what it means to us.

God: The Original Author; Part One

It’s every author’s dream to write an original, best-selling story. However, I realized today that no one has ever done that. Every story ever written draws on other things.

I’m not saying they aren’t good. I’m not saying they don’t have unique aspects. I’m just saying they aren’t original. Even the most bizarre fantasy or outlandish science fiction is still based in our way of understanding things, and so we draw on things we know.

Take the Chanur saga, by C. J. Cherryh. In her books, two of the races breathe methane instead of oxygen, and their language is so different from ours that it can only be translated into a matrix of words that needs to be read up, down, sideways, and diagonal. Wow! Original, right?

No. A unique combination, but not quite original. Methane is still a gas, like oxygen, they still travel on land, and matrices are familiar to us, though using them as language is a new twist.

There has only ever been one truly original story ever written; we’re all living it right now.

In the beginning, there was nothing. No-thing. There wasn’t even emptiness, because there was no space to be empty. But in that nothingness, God is.

God, drawing on nothing but himself, created the concept, and the reality, of time. He invented time. He is (for all my Whovian friends) the first and the last and the greatest Timelord.

The He created space. Not anything in it yet, but He replaced nothingness with emptiness. Then He filled the emptiness. With a word, He invented energy. “Let there be Light.” And there was. Out of nothing, He made everything. After energy, He invented matter.

And isn’t that what every author wants to do? Create something from nothing? We can’t, of course. Our minds can’t come up with something totally different from everything that is. But we try to emulate our Author, and so we write.

Write on, wyrms.

Non-Writing Related: The Effect of Society on a Christian

This is just a theory in progress that I came up with, so it may or may not be solid. In short: the worse society is, the better Christians have to be. In the Victorian Era, most of the people were pretty decent people, with their awesome clothes and carriages and gloves and dueling. Being a Christian in that time only meant that you went to church and showed love and kindness to everyone.

Today, it’s much harder. When every third word out of the average person’s mouth is a cuss word, when ‘teasing’ and ‘playing around’ is common, Christians have to be paragons of virtue in order to make an impression. One slip and you lose a lot of credibility.

Yeah. Just a thought I had. Society is in a sad, sad place right now…