Newspaper Article

By Emily Towns and Mitch Capps (Me). This was written for the high school newspaper. It remains unpublished, so I'll whip it out here.

"We ride through the traffic of a thousand sins each day. And as we ride, can we honestly say we don't run a few red lights ourselves? There is terror in the streets.
But before any of this happened, there existed a foreign government: paradise. Almighty God had laid out a spread for us so scrumptious we can not dare to envision it's taste, lest we understate it to the point of blasphemy. What a racket we had. But as it would happen there was an intruder. An intruder who must have been something of a mystic. For in his cunning he persuaded a perfectly clean pair of lips to wrap themselves with relish around a forbidden fruit.
Then everything changed.
Humanity was cursed to the dirt and sweat and sin that would begin to shape civilization forever. The world began to tear itself apart.
Cain killed his brother. The earth was flooded clean from violence and immorality, but the second batch proved as bad. Noah became a drunkard, Babel built itself higher in their arrogance, Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed in their sin, Abraham turned his back on his wife to save his skin--twice, with his son following suit, Jacob hijacked his brother's birthright, Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers and unsuccessfully seduced by Potiphar's wife. When God had had enough and laid down his commandments they were smashed by the sight of God's people worshiping a calf of gold. Sampson was shamed, a virgin daughter of Israel raped until death, medium's were consulted, Saul committed suicide, David committed adultery and murdered. Bael was esteemed, the prophet's of the Lord were killed, the priests married heathen wives.
The planet was in sad shape. A hero was coming...for a price.
It is recognized that this hero was of a divine nature. A painful metamorphosis had to be undergone. His motivation? That would be us. But not the 'us' that you find going to church, singing hymns, or with our nose in the Bible, oh no. The 'us' that you find wasting the blood he spent in saving our skins. The 'us' that on a regular basis spits in the face of salvation and sins anyway. He was going to enter a sin-wired body for this? He was going to mingle with the traitors, the thieves, and the liars for this?
He absolutely was, and He absolutely did. Why? Because we were His children, He loved us, and we needed Him."

On a related note, I was lying down beside a campfire recently and I got to thinking along the lines of the crucifixion and it got me to thinking what love was. I wonder what love is a lot and I often wonder if feelings have to be present or not. Then I wonder if Jesus felt love for us when he was going through all of this. I wonder if he didn't just do it because he loved us (whatever that means) and not because he felt a good feeling towards us that is often related to love, but because we were his kids and he had always known what love really was and its definition. It's a series of acts that are for someone else's benefit. So you know love isn't that fun a lot of the time. I wonder of most of it isn't tough stuff. I wonder if I've ever really acted in love. You wonder a lot of things lying by a campfire. You should give it a whirl.