Any parent or lover knows this: love is chosen. You cannot, in the end, force anyone to love you.

So if you are writing a story where love is the meaning, where love is the highest and best of all, where love is the point, then you have to allow each person a choice. You have to allow freedom. You cannot force love. God gives us the dignity of freedom, to choose for or against him (and friends, to ignore him is to choose against him).

This is the reason for what C.S. Lewis called the Problem of Pain. Why would a kind and loving God create a world where evil is possible? Doesn’t he care about our happiness? Isn’t he good? Indeed, he does and he is. He cares so much for our happiness that he endows us with the capacity to love and to be loved, which is the greatest happiness of all.

He endows us with a dignity that is almost unimaginable.

For this creator God is no puppeteer.

“Trust me in this one thing,” God says to us. “I have given the entire earth to you, for your joy. Explore it; awaken it; take care of it for me. And I have given you one another, for love and romance and friendship. You shall be my intimate allies. But on this one matter, you must trust me. Trust that my heart for you is good, that I am withholding this for a reason. Do not eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil...or you will die.”

And this is where our Story takes its tragic turn.

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