The Weekly Hope

    This is the last post in my three-part "Playing God" series. Hopefully you've gained some useful insights from the previous posts, but now it's time to wrap things up with one of my favorite Gospel topics: Agency.     When I was younger, our family was having a conversation about a story in the Book of Mormon where this guy called "the brother of Jared" has a ton of faith in God and gets to see everything that happens in the world from the beginning to the end, and my brother made the following observation (paraphrased):     "If God knows everything that's going to happen so well that He can show the brother of Jared the whole history of the world from beginning to end... what's the point? If He already knows what we're going to choose, why send us to Earth in the first place? He already knows who will be faithful and who won't! I feel like I don't have agency anymore, because everything I do is already pre-determined!"     ...

    This second installment in my three-part "Playing God" series relates to the first, in that it is an offshoot of the first. In the previous post, I said that God is the Author of our lives--the one with the plot in hand--and He is going to make sure that everything turns out to our good.     In this post, I want to answer a couple common questions asked by members of my faith (and many others too, I'm sure).     The first question is, "If I'm trying to be righteous and do everything I'm supposed to, why do I still go through hard things?"     In my experience as a fantasy author, my characters are justified in asking the exact same thing. Some of the things I've put them through are hard!  If I were a gambler, I'd be willing to bet that if any of my characters met me in person and knew who I am and the role I play in their lives, they would probably want to punch me in the face--probably multiple times.     A short list of the t...

    The last few weeks have brought up a lot of little thoughts that have combined into one big breakthrough. Let's just say that my mom and I have been learning a lot about life, love, and God.      In this three-part series of blog posts, I'm going to try and summarize the thoughts I've accumulated--but I doubt it will be easy, because there's a lot here. I am never going to be able to collect all the revelations, realizations, and lessons we've had into one neat series of blog posts, and I'm not sure I'd want to try taking on that monolithic task anyway.      As a result, this series is just going to be about God, and the things I've unknowingly learned about Him from 5 years of intensive study into the art and craft of fantasy writing.    The first piece to this giant puzzle is the answer to the question, "Why fantasy writing?" (Or, rather, fiction writing in general...)     This ties in to the first thought that contribute...