When I started the Lily story, I really didn’t have a well planned out direction of where I wanted the story to go.  I knew I wanted the main character to be a teenage girl that had a personality as opposite to me as possible.  I knew I wanted her to live a fairly normal teenage life with lots of friends and sisters.  And I knew there was going to be a supernatural element to the story.

I didn’t know exactly what the nature of that supernatural element was going to be, but I knew that there was going to be a supernatural element.

The honest truth about this story is that I didn’t know where it was going to go from day to day, any more than the readers did.  I had a general direction, but I often sat down at the computer, said to myself “I wonder what Lily’s up to today”… and then I found out.

A few characters actually emerged as the story progressed, characters I wasn’t planning on as the story was progressing.  The idols, for example.  Jack (and I’m still not convinced he was a good choice).  And…. “The Boss”.

From the very beginning, faith and religion have a pretty strong influence in Lily’s life.  I mean, the way she found Dave and Sabby at first was that one of the doctors that tended to her went to Dave and Sabby’s church, and the pastor is the one who connected them.  This is explained in the very first diary that Lily wrote.  And as it proceeds, we find out that Dave and Sabby are actually pretty strong people of faith, and Christianity is actually a pretty strong driver and influence in Lily’s new life.  But what I’m particularly proud of is that fact that I don’t ever explicitly say that.

Nowhere in the story does anyone get preachy.  In fact, kind of the opposite.

From the very beginning of the story, Sabby is conflicted about her faith.  She has a strong faith, but she wrestles with it.  She’s not a super-christian lady who runs around preaching Jesus to everyone she meets.  She’s a woman with a past, one who found redemption and turned her life around, but she still has a past, she still has traumas, and she’s still dealing with them.  She finds comfort in her church and in God, but there are things she finds difficult.

And this is a theme throughout the story, actually.  Lily finds religion a difficult topic, and she finds church life to be difficult as well.  She likes all of the social ties that church brings, and she’s grateful to the church and the pastor for everything they’ve done for her, but she’s very aware (and surprisingly so) of how much they also fail her.  She and the pastor butt heads more than once as they try to understand what her “calling” is, and sometimes the pastor needs to have a teachable moment (and so does Lily).

Lily is not a story about Christianity.  It’s a story about a Christian family.  And there’s a big difference.

But about three quarters of the way through the story, a new character was introduced, “the Boss”.  It’s a character that kind of manifests as she starts to understand more about how she came to be what she is.  And as she learns more about that character, she finds out… it’s Jesus.  But even then, the story does not get preachy.  As is always the case when I write Jesus as a character (this isn’t the first story in which I’ve done that), I didn’t write him as a religious character.  I wrote him as a character with the attributes of Jesus, but as just a part of the story.  And there’s a significant distinction there.

This story is not and never was an avenue for preaching Jesus, and yet what it turned into was a story where Christian values and Christian thought takes a significant role, but just as a background fact, not as the point of the story.  It’s just something that is.

And that’s, frankly, why I suspect this story was somewhat inspired.  I’m not sure how I could have pulled that off by myself.

I have a pretty conflicted relationship with religion, Christianity, and Jesus myself.  I don’t think I could live with myself if I wrote a story where everyone was just super great Christian people and Jesus was this “angelic” character that comes down out of nowhere and saves everyone.  Life is more difficult than that, even Christian life, maybe especially Christian life.  Sure, Jesus saves and all that, but what that actually means is something that often involves a lot of pain and tears and a whole lot of other stuff that Christians like to gloss over.  I didn’t want to gloss over it in Lily’s story.  I wanted the pain and the tears and…  also the victories and triumphs…  to be at the forefront.

I wanted the story to be alive.

I regret a lot of things about Lily, but strangely enough (and even more strangely if you know me well) that’s not one of them.  The story did not turn out to be preachy, it was sometimes emotional and raw and sometimes religion, etc., wasn’t portrayed positively.  But at the end of the day, it’s a story where “the Boss” and the faith of Lily’s family and friends had a significant role in making her life better.  And in return, she as a “walking shrine” made everyone’s life better too.  Because, in a real way, the God that she enshrines is Jesus.

Interestingly, I took something for granted, by the way.  Many times through the story, Lily calls herself a “walking shrine”, and Japanese people tend to bow and clap at her.  I didn’t realize until like last week that this would go over most peoples’ heads.  See…  when Japanese people worship, they go to a shrine, drop a coin or some money into the shrine, ring a bell, bow, clap, pray, clap some more, and then leave… mostly in that order.  They’re paying their respects to the kami (God) that they believe is enshrined in the, well, shrine.  The reason the Japanese people tend to bow and clap at her when they find out she’s a walking shrine is that… well… that’s how they worship at a shrine.

They’re being respectful to lily’s enshrined kami, even though they don’t know who he is and even though it annoys the snot out of Lily.

In the story, “The Boss” doesn’t mind this.  It’s not that he thinks it’s a superior form of worship, but they are worshipping, and when they worship at Lily, they’re actually worshipping a real god who has real powe.r  Something Yuki learns to her great surprise when her obaasan (grandmother) is healed.  In fact, he says that somewhat directly in one of the diary posts.

But that doesn’t mean their style of worship is wrong.  It’s just that they’re so used to worshipping things (like enshrined Gods) that have little to no power.

So that’s why they keep bowing and clapping at Lily, and why Lily gets so annoyed at it.

Anyway, that was my thoughts on this.  I’m kind of happy with how that part of the story turned out, being honest.  I don’t think I went too far in any particular way, and that might be the most difficult thing about writing this kind of story.

I just installed Linux Mint on an old Dell laptop I have, so now I can write these while making use of, well, my lap.  Yay me.  One of these days I’m going to get around to trying Devuan – I hate systemd so, so much.  My two week vacation starts in a couple of weeks and the hope is that I can spend that time with all these projects – including Lily.  In between much needed naps.

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