I teach 7th grade English Language Arts, and read a lot of Young Adult (YA) literature to find books I can recommend to my students. Some of them are incredibly trashy (Pretty Little Liars), but many are high quality, thought-provoking works of fiction. Right now, dystopian literature is all the rage. “A dystopia is an unpleasant (typically repressive) society, often propagandized as being utopian.” Some of these books, like The Giver and Matched, portray orderly, “perfect” societies in which all choice has been removed.
For example, meals are delivered to homes, marriages are arranged, jobs are assigned, possessions are limited, dreams are monitored, and pills are used to manage urges, knowledge, memories, etc. They are perfectly organized, peaceful societies. The protagonists in the stories slowly begin to question a world without choices and decide to live in a chancier world with choices.
It dawned on me this morning as I was finishing Matched that these books are the perfect answer to the question we often hear, “If God is so powerful, why didn’t He create a world without evil?” I usually answer something about how God doesn’t want us to be robots, but next time I think I will give them a copy of The Giver and ask if they would really prefer living like that.
And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. Joshua 24:15
Fearless 
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