Near the end of my college career, I took a fiction-writing class.  It was not my crowning college achievement.

I wrote one pedantic short story about some college student taking the bus home only to . . . well, I can’t remember the rest.  Other than that, I started thinking through what every guy with a thing for science fiction and fantasy does: writing his own epic narrative.  I remember well the day that the small class discussed a handful of “fragments” I had put together.  A couple of readers were curious about the greater whole; the rest of the class was frustrated.  That was part of the story’s intention.

My story opened in media res, with a nameless, history-less figure appearing in a field following a storm (shades of Superman, anyone?).  As the character encountered people and places and artifacts, he would learn more about himself, and the reader would learn more about this odd world that such a blank-slate character had found himself in.  It was an existential journey that would lead to certainty.

I think of that story, and the frustration it caused some of those kind readers that day, often, mainly because I often feel like that character: knowing and not knowing, traversing a landscape that he should know well but doesn’t (and yet with an author’s confidence that he will).  This has been especially true for me in the context of my tripartite faith (faith in general, my faith, and the faith).  Twelve years of trying to teach the Bible to teenagers can do that to you: you’re lost and found all the time.  Throw in issues and questions about church, friendships, politics, and the creeping suspicion that you are ever and always in the minority, and you’ve got the makings of a story ripe for deconstruction and a sour ending.

But every now and again, just like the lead character in my unfinished story, I come across a person, travel through a place, or discover some artifact (quite often a book, sometimes a song) that both reveals and reminds.  This past Christmas it happened while talking with a college roommate on a run to get pizza.  Something in the talk of past and present set me on a course, a trail really, that I am still trying to follow, really believe is leading me somewhere.

And as with that unfinished character in that unfinished story, context big and small can mean everything.