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I didn’t expect the response I had from yesterday’s post.
God loves to surprise us.
If you missed yesterday’s post, I ended with this challenge:
do you have a situation in your life similar to mine where you need to go toe to toe with that demon and take ground back?
I had hoped someone reading the entry might be tempted to take up the challenge but I wasn’t even remotely expecting the person who sent me a message a short time after publication.
The message came in via Facebook from a woman who attended high school with me back in the olden days (a.k.a. the late 80s.) She said that she had read my blog post and wanted to take me up on the challenge. She said when she received a friend request from me last year (the 20 year reunion had “friend recommendations” flying) she almost didn’t accept it because of something that happened when we were in school together. She shared, I shared and within a few messages long held wounds began surprisingly quick healing. (Well, quick on my wounds, I can’t speak for her.) That’s why yesterday I said on twitter about God allowing more ground to be taken back.
Later, as I shared the exchange with my wife, something jumped out in my mind. It was something that my friend shared in her second message to me…
You seemed wrapped up with things on the dark side and it scared the crap out of me.
I wasn’t Christian back then, so my being “on the dark side” may not seem as shocking as it would otherwise, but it made me think about what happened on September 19th when my family & I were cruising down the Natchez Trace Parkway. If you didn’t read that entry, God spoke to me through my wife that I had been investing too much of my time in things that were dark. Horror movies. Crime novels. Supernatural stories. Demons, darkness…
I titled the post “Here comes the paradigm shift.” I thought the removal of those things from my life was the shift. No, the shift happened last night after the words of my friend really sank into my heart.
You seemed wrapped up with things on the dark side and it scared the crap out of me.
I had never really moved past being that boy who scared her. Sure, I was older, a little more mature, a follower of Christ…but I still had that darkness within me that I not only continued to permit but fed and grew. I may have covered it up with “light filled” language but the darkness still maintained my focus. I was still enamored with serial killers and the “dark” characters the world had to offer instead of the “light” characters and good guys that stopped them.
And that’s why God shut down my ability to write fiction.
My writings…my entire first novel…came from a place of writing the story to make the serial killer the driving force and the “good guys” were secondary creations put in place to not make the story seem so dark. The entire focus of that novel was 180 degrees off where it should have been…and God couldn’t allow that. It wasn’t that crime fiction was bad; it wasn’t that the story itself was bad; it was that the focus was wrong. The killer shouldn’t be seen as a hero. However, because of the grounding of my youth toward “dark” things, it naturally came out of me to make the killer (and thus, the evil) the focus of the story.
That’s not fiction from a Christian perspective. Coming from a Christian perspective, the evil has to be…well…evil. The dark has to be and remain dark. Sure, it’s possible you could have what seems to the world to be valid reason for an “evil” character’s actions but to glorify that would be secular fiction without a Christian worldview. It would be something that I didn’t want to write and I don’t think is the reason God gave me the gift of writing.
And so another wall falls.
And for some reason, I think that my preferred genre of writing might even be coming back only from a different point of view. I’ll have to spend some more time in prayer over this one.
I’ve also noticed the spiritual warfare around me working in a new direction…but I’ll touch on that in tomorrow’s video blog.
