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Thanks for the tag, @pursuewisdom!

The bits from @josiah resonated with me. Seeing people say “It doesn’t matter how good I am, God will work through me!” and “This is for God’s glory, not man’s, so I need not adhere to the standards of man (with, like, editing)” drive me insane. We need to be great storytellers if we want to be great Christian storytellers.

And though this isn’t necessarily what Josiah said, I think it’s at least adjacent: Non-Christians grapple with life, morality, and difficult questions as much as Christians do. We ask the same questions. Non-Christians don’t write stories preaching moral relativism, pragmatism, existentialism, or whatever -ism because they actively loath God (well, not most of the time) but because they are trying their hardest to find the closest thing to a belief system that adheres to their experience of reality.

We need to stand next to people and show them we experience the same reality they do, or rather that they experience the same reality they do. We grapple with the same questions. Christians have faith that our answers are correct, and that theirs do not breed ultimate truth, but we feel the same pain. We bleed the same red. Most times, we hold the same hopes and fears in our hearts.

A lot of young Christian storytellers are keen on convicting the hearts of sinners and apostates because when you’re fourteen years old in a sheltered Christian home and have never seen the most vulnerable parts of an unbeliever’s life, it’s the easiest thing in the world to be a zealot. That’s who I was as a young teenager. I see my old self in so many of the people on this forum, and it breaks my heart.

So if you’re a young person reading this, please ask God to help you improve your craft to the point you are writing great stories which touch human hearts because they speak to human needs. Execute these stories according to what you believe, and fill them with God’s truth, but write them for the hurting people who need them.

Cesar A. Cruz (and probably someone before him) said that the purpose of art is to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable. I believe we should adhere to that. We should show the real pain that people feel. It lets the hurting know they are not alone, and reminds the comfortable that there is hurting in the world. Someone needs to know they are not alone before they know Who is with them, and that there is a problem before they can believe a Solution is necessary.

In this, above all else, let us be showers of the word, and not tellers only.