I was eight or nine, sitting at a beige plastic desk, a copy of the MCAS (the Massachusetts standardized test for elementary schoolers) test book on my right and an answer booklet full of bubbles under the pencil in my right hand. These testing sessions were times of great pressure (“Do your best!” “No cheating!”) and as a dedicated rule-follower, I was determined to do everything right.
But then I started reading the next reading comprehension passage in the text, and the room’s smudged chalkboard and gray threadbare carpet faded away.
The short story started with two astronauts on Mars who are making their way back to their shuttle on the dark side of the planet before sunrise. If they are caught by the sun, they will fry in Mars’s thin atmosphere. Suddenly, one of the astronauts trips and breaks his ankle. Even in Mars’s lesser gravity, he can’t run back to the shuttle on his own in time. His friend, the main character, straps his leg to his friend’s wounded one so they can run three-legged-race style. This main character cheers on his friend as they feel the fatally hot sunrise approaching at their backs: “We’ll have nice, cool ice cream when we get back!”
As the sun threatens to bake them both and they are still out of sight of the shuttle, the main character realizes that if he stays with his friend, they could both die. If he cuts the cords that bind them and runs at full speed, he could survive — leaving his friend to die.
“NO!” he shouts (I remember the caps), horrified that he would even think such a thing, and runs harder. He fades to unconsciousness as the sun rises.
He wakes up in the shuttle. He and his injured friend both made it. “Dude, you were out of your mind, babbling about ice cream,” his captain tells him wryly.
I was paralyzed with delight. I have some English major/literary analysis language now to explain why the story thrilled me to my core: set in Mars, it’s a martial story, a battle of courage vs. selfishness, valor vs. self-preservation. But in that moment, I just had the child’s pure pleasure of a good happy ending.
In the middle of the MCAS test, I carefully memorized the publication date, magazine title, and character names of the story so I could look it up later. I believe it was from Boy’s Life Magazine, somewhere around 2002 or 2003, and I did find it by Googling later that day, but sadly haven’t been able to rediscover it since.
I doubt the MCAS test-makers could have guessed how that reading sample, followed by the standard reading comprehension questions, would electrify me. It was my first encounter with what has become one of my favorite motifs in literature: the passionate refusal of temptation. A character is faced with what seems like an irresistible temptation — for love, for revenge, for greed, for anything wrong that they desire deeply. But their love for the Good is so powerful that they refuse: forcefully, vehemently, passionately.
Many stories embody a counter-image: a temptation so powerful a character can’t resist it, and then is condemned to suffer the consequences. I believe Edith Wharton especially loves this idea and illustrates it in The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence, Summer, and Ethan Frome. A character is faced with temptation, often a romantic or financial one, can’t resist — then faces the punishment of an indifferent and uncaring society. Sometimes the character survives, and sometimes they don’t. Thomas Hardy also likes to illustrate people trapped in impossible situations with irresistible temptations, especially in his darkest novel, Jude the Obscure. Many modern dramas, especially of the soap opera variety, thrive on this idea: the music swells, the characters exchange glances, and they take the forbidden fruit. They’re victims of unquenchable desire.
But there are stories that carry that theme that temptation can be and should be resisted. Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Les Miserables all resound with a courageous, joyful “no” to alluring temptations.
Those stories are all the more beautiful because the temptations characters face are truly beguiling, and refusing them sometimes makes circumstances much worse in the short-term. These characters step onto the road of suffering, eyes open, because they desire God above their other desires or fears. Like Joseph fleeing from Potiphar’s wife, David standing over Saul’s sleeping body and deciding to spare his life, or the Lord Jesus refuting the devil’s distortions of Scripture with Scripture, these characters look to heaven, not earth, and choose obedience to God over short-lived happiness or safety.
The short story I encountered in the MCAS test made its mark on me because it was not a formulaic multiple-choice answer or simple moral equation. Good stories don’t reduce reality to easy, straightforward choices with immediate results. They are living worlds of images in which vice and virtue, good and evil, eternal and temporal in all their complexities take symbolic form. At their best, they deal honestly with desires, choices, and consequences, recognizing the truth that doing good sometimes makes things worse right away (as happened to Joseph the dreamer), choices have messy and unpredictable consequences, and resisting temptation is excruciatingly hard.
But a good story, well-told, can act like a beacon, a blazing reminder of goodness and truth. The MCAS short story set on Mars, and other good stories, became beacons for me. My longing to belong to God and walk in His ways, kindled by Scripture and the teachings of the church, grew to something fierce and joyful in the light of good stories like this one.
Because He really is that good.
Featured image from science.nasa.gov
- That Joyful “No”: Stories of Resisting Temptation - January 27, 2025
- Storytelling and Side-Glances - September 7, 2020
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