Although “young adult fiction” is not usually my cup of tea, I have enjoyed the wildly best-selling The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins. I was predicting it was going to become a movie, and apparently it will be. The story is about a young girl in a desolate future who participates in a state-mandated annual contest. The contest is composed of randomly selected children, and ends when all but one of them are killed. It is a riveting, albeit depressing, concept, and Collins does a great job painting a picture of a disturbing future through the eyes of a teenage girl.
Maybe it’s because I have a teenaged girl of my own now that I found the book compelling. But most likely it’s the reason I like every good story—because it contains elements of the Grand Story. I have had this theory that any good story (despite the medium—movie, book, spoken, etc.) is good because it has borrowed off of the story that resonates within all of our hearts. It happens to be the same story that we celebrate at Christmastime, the love of God poured out sacrificially through his son Jesus. It is the story of Creation, fall, redemption and restoration. It is the story that has a birth, a life, a death, a resurrection, and transformation. If you look close enough, you can see these threads woven into any story that has ever captured your imagination, and that's because God put them there.
