When I was little I just had to take over on the playground. It didn't matter whether we were pretending to be cowboys trying to bring the outlaw to justice or evil scientists plotting world domination; I just had to run the show. Each game of make believe opened up a whole world of ideas to experiment with and concepts to explore. Until one day I woke up and realized I wasn't a kid anymore.
By the time I had reached the seventh-grade, recess was a thing of the past and all those adventures that I'd go on seemed to dissolve in the tempest that is Junior High. I soon realized that I had to start taking things seriously. I worked hard to keep my grades up and my head down because I had become aware of how childish I must have appeared to my schoolmates. I became a serious, solitary, and silent youth and for awhile I felt a little proud of that fact.
But somewhere deep within the fortress that my mind had become there were little sparks that in the quiet moment I would toy with just to pass the time. Soon those ideas began to turn into little stories that I would play out by self in my daydreams. But they weren't like the stories I'd act out on the playground. These were real stories, stories of struggle, struggles that reflected all the hopes and fears that I had and still have. That's when I knew that I had to do something with these.
The first book I wrote was somewhere around three hundred pages long the second was six hundred and seventy-six pages long. I had hours and hours of hacking away at the keyboard and going on long walks working to complete those stories and I ended up hating them both. I hated them so much I totally deleted the first, never to see it again. The second one I kept filed away inside a folder inside a folder that no one would be able to find on the computer unless they were consciously looking for it. I hated them because of the horrible job they did at expressing those same fears and hopes that had given them life. Their wording was cliche and unrealistic, their plots weren't consistent, their characters were mere stereotypes, the dialogue was helter-skelter. In other words, I was a novice writer.
All through High School, I struggled with coming up with better stories and improving my writing. I read all kinds of books from different genres both popular and unheard of, new and classic. Time after time I would give up on the craft telling myself that it was a waste of time and a childish pursuit only to be drawn back to Microsoft Word to once again try to tell a good story. I churned out dozens of different stories ranging from epic fantasies to historical fictions, looking in all directions to find a way to create something that would sate my thirst for a story that not only entertained me but made me feel something, anything. Always searching but never finding, repeatedly starting but never finishing. I was on a never-ending quest searching for what I couldn't put into words.
After graduating high school I decided to serve a full-time mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints commonly known as the Mormon church. I was called to serve in the South American country of Chile for a period of two years. Missionaries in my church are expected to devote 100 percent of their time to the service of God and the people of their mission, for two years they leave behind family, school, work, dating, and other activities in order to devote their effort to teaching the word of God. This is a daunting task. Especially when the missionary is called to foreign language speaking mission where they must quickly learn the language and adapt to the local climate and culture. I marked this as the moment when I would give up creative writing once and for all in order to do my best at the work which I believed to be of eternal importance.
This just goes to show how little I had learned from all those years of writing stories. Those sparks just refused to die despite my best efforts to squelch them. But I was confident that I would get past it because there was a never ending sea of hard work to occupy my time in Chile. That was my big mistake.
The trials and ordeals that an individual Mormon missionary goes through are far too intimate and expansive to fit into the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that in the mission field you can expect hard physical exhaustion, mental stress, spiritual conflict, endless temptation, and agonizing homesickness, all topped off with having your cherished beliefs and sincere desire to serve rejected and ridiculed over and over again. And keep in mind I was going through all of this while trying to learn Spanish. I'm not trying to degrade the mission at all, nor am I criticizing what my church asks of its missionaries and I am especially not denying the many wonderful experiences and blessings that come from serving in such position. I'm simply stating what I was faced with the day I stepped off that airliner.
After going for nearly a year without writing even a paragraph of a story I was starting to crumble under the eminence burden that I'd have to carry for another year under the sweltering Chilean sun. These trials brought out the worst of me, every day I counted the hours until it was time to go to bed, after especially hard days I'd lay awake at night questioning the very faith that had brought me here. It got to the point where even thinking of my old hobby was torture. Only another reminder of what I was missing out on back home.
But then one day during scripture study I read in the book of Matthew 5: 15-16. Where Christ is preaching the sermon on the mount whilst serving his own mission.
15 Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.
16 Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.
The scripture impressed me for some reason, I wasn't sure at the time. But over the course of a few weeks, I began to realize some surprising things. Many other missionaries were musicians others had a gift for drawing. That was their own personal light that God had given them. They used that light to better themselves and those around them it was then that I realized that I too had a light and I couldn't keep it under the bushel any longer.
I got myself new notebook and pen, and during my free time on Mondays, I would write stories that related to what I was experiencing, how I felt, and what I hoped for. In each main character, I put a piece of myself and a piece of the kind of person I wanted to be then I sent them on a quest and watched as they struggled, grew, and changed. I didn't just write during that time; I bled on the paper. All of my frustrations, my hopes, and fears went the notebook and became something beautiful. I had never written so powerfully, each sentence gave me a quite thrill, each character became a close friend.
As I wrote I learned. Through the stories, I was able to experiment with my own thoughts about the mission and life in general before even putting them into practice. I became much happier in the mission, I began to talk more and listen with greater intention. I began to see the people I taught as characters created by a caring author who had given them a unique story to tell and wanted more than anything to give them a happy ending.
I have since completed my mission honorably and have continued to foster the stories helped to save me when I was at my lowest. I no longer see imagination and creative writing as a game or a hobby, it's become an exercise and a passion. To this day I still learn new things from what I write and glean a new perspective of myself, my circumstances, and those who around me. By fighting the giants on the paper I have found the strength to fight the giants in real life. So no matter what kind of light you have (because you do have one) be it writing or music or underwater basket weaving remember that lights are meant to dispell darkness. They're not much good otherwise.
