In 3rd grade, I blew through all my Matt Christopher books, my sister's Babysitter's Club books, and The Illiad in the span of one summer. Did I understand The Illiad? Absolutely not. But the superficial ideas of the story and the process of taking it in was what I loved. Also, I'm not here to talk about how until high school, I thought Achilles was phonetically pronounced like a-CHILL-ez. So let's just focus on what does matter, ok?
As a child, I never consciously thought that I could do anything with this passion of reading and writing. I just thought it was an aspect of my personality. To drive this idea home, any notion of future possibilities was berated out of me by my 10th grade English teacher, Mr. Latham, and the instrument of destruction was an essay about Jay Gatsby.
All my subsequent professors and teachers helped nurture my delicate confidence back to health, but my interaction with Mr. Latham always existed in my brain like an infection. Writing was never something I could do because Mr. Latham had definitively expressed my inability to write well and he sunk that battleship in front of me and a class of my peers.
It wasn't until a few years ago when my Pastor, John Waters, encouraged me to create skits and dramas for our church. He did it out of the blue and with no prompting from anyone, but him doing this sent me on a writing/creating path that has led to a lot of cool things for me. I have no idea where this path will lead, but at the very least, it gave me a conclusive affirmation that writing was something I could do.
The reason I'm writing this is to say that everyone has a dream. Maybe it is realistic, or maybe it isn't, but dreams are like parents: the deadbeat ones always reveal themselves and the good ones never truly go away.
As much as we all have dreams, we also have a choice. We can be a person that helps people realize their dreams or we can be Mr. Lathams that bluntly traumatize dreamers by weaponizing their own insecurities. Which one are you? Which one will you choose to be today?
You can buy Knox’s new book, Jesus and The Bachelorette here. It’s also available here through Amazon for your Kindle. You should also visit his website, subscribe to his blog, follow him on Twitter and pray for his wife.