The Great Adventure

I was in love. I might have thought I had been in love before, but I really hadn’t know what love was until I met Shelly. She was my world, my future, and everything I thought about.

I asked Robert, my college roommate and best friend, what he thought about her.

“She’s great…I guess,” he said. “She’s no raving beauty.”

What? I couldn’t believe my ears. To me, she was the most beautiful woman in the world. And today, 43 years later, she still is. Time has tempered both of us, and our relationship is not a burning passion like it was when we were in college. But the love that has grown to replace it is much deeper, and I can’t imagine my life without her.

Shelly’s not perfect, despite what I might think, just as I have many flaws. But I truly believe that God couldn’t have chosen a better mate for me. And as I look at her today, both of us in our 60s, I still see the young girl of 20 years old I fell in love with.

Robert didn’t see her the way I did, and I find I have the same problem in my writing. As a Christian, I feel strongly that my writing should reflect my beliefs that Jesus Christ’s sacrifice for me and the life I have chosen are worth sharing. Those who are familiar with this website might have read my Great Adventure Manifesto, where I spell out my belief that the Christian life is meant to be an adventure. It is only perceived as boring today because people are not truly living their Christian lives they way they are meant to be lived.

The books that I write, mostly Christian suspense, are written with this idea in mind. People who don’t see Christians as adventurous don’t see the risks that comes with living dangerously for God, that comes with depending on Him when logic tells you not to. They see logic when they should be looking for miracles. I was recently surprised and a bit amused when I had a couple of miracles in a Christian story I’d written and a reviewer referred it to as “fantasy.” If we as Christians can’t believe in miracles, then I think I’m in the wrong church. Because God is all about miracles.

Anyway that’s the challenge for all writers. You fall in love with an idea, so much that you wrap your life around it. But the world doesn’t see it. It’s your job to somehow convince the world that that idea is as great as you think it is. That’s what writing is all about, whether you’re a Christian or not.

I know you’re in love with someone, or something. You just have to convince the world to be in love with it too.