Saturday, October 07, 2006

a call and passion to write...

There are sometimes when all I want to do is write; as if God were saying unto me. "Alex, write!" I love writing. Where as once I was this little boy who dreaded having to write anything for school now it has become an overwhelming passion in my life. I think one of the first times I remember writing was when I was in elementary school; I had to finish some story about having some dinosaur or something: My grandpa (GP) who was the greatest influence in my life helped me write that paper. I remember writing again in middle school. This time it was a group project; somehow even though I dreaded writing papers I chose to be the writer on the project. Then again as a freshman in high school I had to write a fictional story; I did so with my Dad's help and wrote a story which led to the teacher to believe I had written about an actual historical event. As a sophomore I found wit in writing anonymous pithy comments in my honors English class each week in what was called "The Thought Pot;" once to waste class time, cause of course the teacher read them aloud in class, I wrote the alphabet on a sheep of notebook paper and tore the letters into their own pieces and placed them in the "thought pot:" the teacher thought it was some kind of "code," so we spent the class trying to decipher it. My junior year of high school proved to be the toughest for me. My honors English teacher was no less than a psychotic lune, but somehow, though I hated his class with a passion I learned the art of writing, as well as a bunch of grammar garbage (oooo alliteration) such as: "pigs in zen if it's in its pin." Which means of course that any punctuation goes inside parenthesis or quotation marks. Then my senior year happened; I found my self in College English in which each week we wrote a certain type of paper and then read them to the class on Mondays. It was here that God branded upon my life the power of written words; this class allowed me to write and read to a public school class of lost kids genre after genre of my own literary works with the sole purpose of Glorifying God and communicating His love and mercy to this class. I treasured the moments I spent reading those papers in class. I did not really write again for over a year until my second semester at the Baptist College of Florida. My first paper at the college is to this day earned the worst grade I have gotten on any paper at BCF, but this paper also received the greatest comment I have ever received on any paper. It comment reads something to the effect of how my paper was a bit off topic and did cover what it was intended to cover, yet it was the best written paper this professor had ever seen at the college. I have never been so proud of any paper, with maybe the exception of a paper I wrote six months later for the same professor which earned the rare, if ever occurring, perfect score. I love writing, I love the use of words in new ways, I love humor and wit, and I love touching other people through words God has given me to put to paper. My desire in life is to honor God in all He has called me to be and to write as He has called me to write.

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