I love a good story--authors like Frank Peretti, C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Joel Rosenberg, Nicholas Sparks. In grade school I stumbled across Anne of Green Gables and got caught up in its misty charm. I thought for years I must have dreamed the story, because I couldn’t find the book again.

I wrote my first fiction in the eighth grade, because I was bored with a research assignment on Hog Farming. (See story here.) It was not the usual format for such an assignment, but the teacher marked it with an A, writing Very Good across the front page.

I still have the tablet. The words written in red. A big exclamation mark following the Good.

The teacher’s name was Glen Hochstetler. God bless his heart. I know now he could have rebuked me for breaking the rules, dashed my joy into the hard ground. But he didn’t. He praised me, not just in class but in front of the whole one-room schoolhouse.

This mark--of doing what I’m not supposed to do--still follows me. I have written love stories. All while the Christian community is firmly convinced that men cannot understand women.

Sorry. I didn’t mean to break the rules. But I still like it when people mark my paper Very Good.