A Summer Adventure...

I've got a few things planned for the summer that should be pretty fun. I'm working for the Ballet and taking classes, which should keep me in good shape and be exciting. I'm also working at a new coffee shop downtown, Rendezvous. It's not the best job in the world, but I get to be around coffee again and there are hours a plenty. I'm also spending a week in Warrensburg for Boys State once again. That always proves to be pretty interesting, what with a thousand high schoolers between their junior and senior years and an extreme lack of sleep. All this amidst a smattering of float trips, camping expeditions, and movies with friends around the midwest.

But what I'm most excited/scared about is an adventure I'm embarking on with one of my very best friends, Keith. He's a very well read, intelligent, driven guy who I went to high school with. We played the french horn together, ended up becoming good friends, and have remained close since we moved to different ends of the state - he is an English major at Westminster while I'm here in Springfield. Needless to say, our majors compliment each other very well making for some incredible discussions which run late into the evenings. He's one of those people who really challenges me in life in general, but especially spiritually. An all-around great person in my life.

Anywho, he's a writer. Keith is an accomplished short story writer and has been attempting to write a book for years now, always stopping short of the mark. This summer, though, he has convinced me (and a few other friends) to enter a novel writing competition in the month of July. It's a month long competition with a 50k word mark. Myself not being a serious writer in any way, I'm very intimidated, excited, daunted, and serious about getting this done.

I'm going to follow this rule: Only write what you know. I'm only going to write about ideas I understand, experiences I've had (few though they are), and challenges I've come across. That way I can avoid looking like the twenty year old know-nothing that I am. With that in mind, I think the best way to go is to allegorize my own life in some way.

The general questions I think I'm going to focus on are those that flow from the problem of evil. How do we believe in a good God when people we love die painful, seemingly unnecessary deaths? How do we reconcile the idea that "Jesus loves me" with the hurt in the world? What does it mean to be religious versus being spritual? Questions like these bother me pretty much every day, they're what I know. Thus, that's what I'll focus on. Any ideas? I'm pretty new at this whole thing, but I love challenges, so here we go.