Faith and Writing

I mentioned on my vlog that I was going to post the devotional I gave for my Advanced Writing of Fiction class, so here it is! Thank you all for reading, and shalom!

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Faith and Writing

Going to a Christian college, it’s easy to get inundated with all the Christian ways to do things. Every class tries to incorporate God directly into what they’re teaching in some way, all the writers on the newspaper seem to feel the need to reference God or Jesus at least five times in their articles, and then there’s the chapels every day, where they encourage you to go even more to some Christian evangelizing event or whatnot evening. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a bad thing, it just is what it is. It comes with the territory of going to a Christian college that we all signed up for and even likely wanted. Now, in writing class, we are asked to contemplate faith and writing and how they affect one another.

The concept of faith and writing is rather simple to me anymore, though it wasn’t always. Before I understood faith, or if I really even had it, I would have broken some synapse in my mind trying to figure this one out. But now, to me it seems, faith and writing isn’t something you do, it’s what you live. I believe that if you have faith, writing your faith will be like breathing; it’s going to happen. I say this because who can honestly say that their biases and worldview and beliefs don’t make it into their own writing in some way or another? To write differently from what you believe, truly differently, you would have to become a different person in the most literal sense. Tolkein didn’t set out to write some Christian novel, and I hear even C.S. Lewis wasn’t planning Narnia to be the allegory that it was, but both wrote compellingly beautiful novels that speak to us of God’s love and the struggle between good and evil.

Many young authors feel like they need to directly reference God in their stories, and squirm a little bit when someone asks what their story is going to say about God or if it even has Christian characters. They hesitantly answer that they don’t know to the first question, and “no” to the second, and contemplate scrapping the idea for something that will be a little more “Christiany.” I believe their stories already were. Should we honor God by writing worlds that he didn’t create? And I’m not talking about fantasy here so much as who people are and what they really do. What lessens people really take from day to day life, and what is simply too disgusting for them to believe in their pain. We all like the characters who stick with God unquestioningly when faced with hardship, but how many people really do that? Don’t most rather whine and complain, like Job did? Or doubt, like Thomas, claiming that they must see God’s hands before they will believe? And what does God’s faithfulness really look like? Does everyone get what they want, and then sing praises in the streets in the end? Or rather, is it a subtle learning of love that takes place in their life when they learn of the grace that God has for them, soon or long after learning of their wickedness?

To write faith into one’s stories I would say, then, simply requires one to have faith. To know God, and then faith and writing will happen.