Short Eternal Story

The high school Composition class I am teaching is going well, though I don't like all of the grading. I would much rather write a story than try to grade one. I have several talented writers in my class. Currently we are working on short stories. Short stories often have a moral, and rarely do they end well. Besides writing short stories, the kids are having to read a couple each week. It is interesting to me that the kids have enjoyed the older stories better than the "newer" ones. The more recent ones aren't really all that recent, but in comparison they are. They have enjoyed The Bet by Chekov, Dr. Heidegger's Experiment by Hawthorne, God Sees the Truth But Waits by Tolstoy, and An Honest Thief by Dostoyevsky. Some of the kids don't like the sad endings, but they seem to understand the morals behind them. Perhaps that is why the kids like these stories: morals. All of the kids have been raised to know Christ and His standards. They understand right and wrong, good and evil, just and unjust. I have been reading Jesus Freaks lately; it's a book about Christian Martyrs. What I mostly notice is Communism's lack of understanding. Communists try very hard to eradicate Christianity because Christians pledge to a higher authority. They can't seem to see, however, that the higher authority actually allows them to serve those around them in an even better way than communism requires. How can feeding the hungry, serving the helpless, and loving the orphaned be bad in any society? It seems that life on Earth is the basic short story...Good versus evil, but it doesn't always look like the good wins. To those of us who know the Eternal Story, and not the just the short version, it is the Pulitzer Prize Award Winner.