Terminally Ill

When you’ve loved a man for just nearly a decade, it is sometimes difficult to remember why you started loving him. What you think about more often is the way he forgot to put the trash out on Sunday night, and how you asked him twice to pick up a gallon of milk last Tuesday, and of course he forgot. Of course he did. And then you weren’t able to use those very ripe bananas to bake that loaf of banana bread. And then you had to toss out the bananas. All six of them.

You don’t necessarily remember how it was that you walked out of some theatre in some small town when you were all of nineteen and he was all of twenty, his being a more sophisticated age, to be sure—him a worldly twenty, you still trapped in your teens. You don’t necessarily remember all the details of that movie you watched, only that it was a little (ok a lot) cheesy and about some underdog, under loved and under valued by the world. You don’t necessarily remember him saying that he always had a soft spot for the underdogs, for the under-loved and under-valued, and that he was ok with being a little cheesy for the sake of that. You don’t necessarily remember all of that.

“I’ve always had a soft spot for the ‘Radios’ of the world,” he said all those years ago, referring to the unlikely hero of the film. And you said, both inside and out, “Me too!”

Here and now, James and I are seated in the formal living room on the brown sofa with the firm seat cushions and the sweetheart back, the one I bought at Pier 1. The social worker is on the white slip covered chair to our right, the one I found marked half off at Pottery Barn. A year ago, when I bought this sofa and that chair, I had been hoping that maybe one day we’d be sitting just as we are now. I dreamed this moment in Pier One, in Pottery Barn and a million other times, and now here we are in it. We are halfway through the process of becoming licensed Nevada Foster and Adoptive Parents. Half way. Soon enough. We are almost there.

My husband and I discuss our life experiences with the social worker. Somewhere in the mix, James talks about losing family members—his experiences and not mine to share here. I talk about my own losses. A childhood illness. Sitting in a hospital bed when I was nine years old, listening to my mother say, “No it won’t ever go away. And I am so so so very sorry.” Throwing that stupid teddy bear up against the wall and watching it bounce and hit the tiled hospital floor. Screaming, wailing, how it just wasn’t fair. I didn’t want a teddy bear. I didn’t want all these stupid flowers and these stupid cards. What I wanted was to be home with my Barbie’s, in my own bed with the pink quilt and the white lace pillows and not in a sterile hospital bed with some dumb disease to deal with for the rest of my life.

I talk about that, and then the social worker asks a question for which I wasn’t prepared.

“How would you feel about caring for a terminally ill child?”

And I had thought I was a twenty-eight-year-old woman sitting on the sofa in the living room of my marital home in Nevada, but no. That wasn’t the case. I was instead nine years old and back on a hospital bed in Atlanta.

Her name was Alexis, and I named a baby doll after her some months after we met. We shared a hospital wall, with her room being one door down from mine.

“Are you scared?” I whispered, worried that a grown-up might hear, as we sat cross-legged on my hospital bed. Maybe it wasn’t ok to be talking about this. Maybe I shouldn’t bring it up.

“Yeah,” she said all adult like, folding her hands in her lap in a certain way that seemed so very mature. She was eleven and I was nine, but it was more than that.

“What I have isn’t so bad,” I said, resolutely. “What you have is worse.”

She should have said, “Yes it is,” but instead she just said, “It’s all tough. Every kid in here has it tough.”

In 1992, at Egleston’s Children’s Hospital of Atlanta, the Juvenile Diabetics shared the sixth floor with the Cystic Fibrosis patients. It made sense. The diseases have a lot in common, genetically speaking.

At regular intervals during the day, I could hear the nurses knock on her door, their knuckles announcing the violent intrusion. Sometimes I’d hear Alexis groan into the wall in response, a low and guttural noise that obviously meant, “Again? Already?” Footsteps would follow, and thereafter the rapidly repetitive thwack, thwack, thwack as the nurses beat on her back, working to break up the mucus that threatened to drown her.

We sat on my hospital bed, her and I, whispering and playing a board game that I’d won in a round of bingo at the hospital’s weekly night of entertainment. It was “Mall Madness” and, as it so happened, I’d been coveting that board game for ages. Imagine my surprise when I was the first kid in the room to call out “Bingo!” and run to the prize table up front where I could pick any prize I wanted. Obviously, I went straight for Mall Madness, and that produced a collective gasp from every other girl in the room. They’d obviously had their eyes on it too.

“You’re so lucky,” said Alexis, as we sat on my hospital bed and rolled the dice and sorted the cards. “I’ve wanted this game for ages.”

There was a knock then at my door. In walked my mom, her eyes red and swollen, followed by Alexis’ mom as well, her face clean and seeming, even to my nine year old self, like one of experience and wisdom. She wasn’t new to this being a mom of a sick kid. A small wave of anger rose up inside me. What was she saying to my mom? Something about coping? I didn’t want my mom to cope. I didn’t want myself to cope. This wasn’t fair.

It was bedtime, or so the adults told us. Alexis glanced at the clock on the wall opposite my bed.

“I had fun playing Mall Madness,” she said, and then wafted her little eleven year old self down off the bed, out the door, back to her bed against the wall that we shared. Thirty minutes later I heard the familiar thwack, thwack, thwack, and the gurgling of her lungs as she coughed and hacked and worked very hard to breathe.

“It’s not fair,” I said to my mother.

“No,” she said. “It isn’t fair.”

At the foot of my hospital bed sat Mall Madness all neatly boxed back up from where we had been playing earlier. I stared at it intently. I’d been wanting that game for ages, and so had Alexis, as she had told me. We both really wanted it.

Thwack, thwack, thwack came the noise through the wall, and then the gurgling and the coughing and the occasional small whimper.

I was coming into the understanding, slowly, that sometimes you want something so very bad that it aches, but you aren’t able to have it no matter how hard you try and wish and work and plead. Sometimes you can’t win what you want at a game of bingo. Not in a million bingo games. Not ever.

“Do you think it would be ok if I gave Mall Madness to Alexis?” I asked my mom. I was not sure if this was ok. Somewhere in my young conscience, I feared that maybe this would come off condescending.

“I think that if you want to give Alexis Mall Madness,” said my mother, considering, “then you should.”

“You think it’s ok?” I asked.

“If you think it’s ok, then I think it’s ok,” said my mom.

The next morning, I crawled out of my hospital bed. Trailing a hanging IV bag on its metal cart behind me, I walked one room over and knocked tentatively on Alexis’ door. Her mother appeared with a look on her face somewhere between annoyance and exhaustion. When she glanced down and met my eyes, her features softened.

“Hello Heather,” she said. My mother smiled from somewhere behind me, and I was aware that the adults were exchanging something in their faces.

“Hello,” I responded. “Can Alexis come out?”

More exchanged glances.

“She isn’t feeling that well right now,” said her mother. “Maybe she can come out later?”

I frowned. I hadn’t prepared for that. Mom was holding Mall Madness behind me, and I turned to look at her, unsure of what I should do next. Mom to the rescue.

“I think,” said my mother, stepping forward, “that Heather wanted to give Alexis a gift.”

“Yes!” I said, suddenly surer of myself. “I wanted to give her Mall Madness. I have a lot of board games anyway. I don’t really need Mall Madness…” I trailed off. Should I keep talking? Should I turn and run?

The board game exchanged hands and disappeared inside Alexis’ room. Her mother thanked me, but I was so embarrassed I barely took it in. Retreating to my own room then, I climbed back into my own hospital bed. Once there, I found another round of cards and gifts of my own waiting. Somewhere in the mix was a pad of paper and a green gel pen.

“Oh how perfect,” said my mother. “Weren’t you wanting some paper to write on?”

I was, and I quickly set to writing things down. Oh to have that little pad of paper now, but I lost it somewhere over the years. What in the world did I write?

A day passed; a night passed, and just as quickly as I’d arrived, I was cleared to return back home—back to my pink quilt and the white lace pillows, back to my Barbie’s but forever changed. Somewhere in the clamor of leaving the hospital, Alexis appeared at my door a little weaker than before. She thanked me for Mall Madness. We swapped addresses and committed to be pen pals forever and ever.

Thereafter, off and on, we exchanged letters with each other, handwritten in pencil on wide ruled notebook paper. At some point in my teens, I posted a note that was never returned. I wasn’t sure if the silence in response was because she was busy dating boys or because she was dead. I still don’t know, and I still wonder.

So now I sit on my sofa in my marital home with the man that I, somewhere along the way from being a kid to becoming an adult, chose as my life partner, and a social worker asks us if we would be ok with parenting a terminally ill child and the first thing that springs from my lips is…

“I…well I….”

I see Alexis’ face in my mind, and I turn to meet James’s eyes. With a wondering look on my face, I ask my husband, “How do you feel about that?”

And the man that I somewhere along the way chose to marry doesn’t hesitate to say, “Yes.” I remember, in that moment, why exactly it was I fell in love with him.

“Yes,” I say to the social worker, too. “Yes we would be happy to parent a terminally ill child.”

Yes we would.

“Not many people say yes,” she says.

We nod. We understand.

“But I think your life experiences would make you a good candidate for it,” she says.

Yes. Maybe they do.

The social worker gathers her bags and leaves our home, and we collapse on the couch afterwards. We made it. We survived. A moment of silence passes, and then my husband pulls me up and tugs me toward the television in another room.

“A movie?” he asks.

“Sounds wonderful,” I say.

As we browse Netflix on Apple TV, I spy the movie “Radio” somewhere in the mix of movie suggestions.

“Radio!” I exclaim. “Do you remember watching that when we were all of nineteen and twenty?”

And he says, “Of course. How could I forget?”

“I knew I loved you after that movie.”

And it’s a really cheesy movie, but we watch it together, curled into each other’s arms on the couch, at intervals crying as we both consider what kind of pain and what kind of joy the future might hold.

Terminally ill. The potential to bury a child. To be a mother and a father dressed in black, mourning their baby.

Ouch.

What a prognosis, terminally ill—but then, aren’t we all? Aren’t we all terminally ill and dying anyway?

I think we can do it. Just maybe…

Somewhere in our paperwork there is a checkbox that is ticked. As I sit here typing tonight, I am thinking about what that one little checkbox could mean for us.

Terminally ill? Sure. Ok. Yes.

I wonder about the child that might be out there right now, dying for sure, but living as he does, and needing a bed and a shower and breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and a mother and a father to provide all of that and maybe a little bit more.

Maybe I could be that mother? Maybe I could bring him into our home and say, at times, “So what? So what if we only have three more years? Let’s live them up.” And at other times hold his collapsing little frame and cry the kind of tears that only sick kids know about. And then maybe when he was really pissed and needed to throw a teddy bear at somebody, he could throw a teddy bear at me? He could throw a punch at me? I could take it? Maybe I could.

Then later, when he was sleeping in his bed, I could kneel in front of his door and wail in silent prayer, pleading with a sovereign God to heal him, please, please, please, please…I could pour my heart out as it broke in a million pieces….and maybe He would heal him. But maybe He wouldn’t.

One little check box. So much potential for so much. Maybe it will never happen. Maybe we will never get that kind of placement. But maybe we will.

I’m ready either way, at least, I want to be. I hope.

Terminally ill.

Ok.

Check.

Be More Catholic

The Mormons are at my house again, two clean-cut young men in short-sleeved collared shirts and black ties. We’ve been talking in the archway of my home’s open front door for half an hour. My neighbor across the street keeps peeking through her curtains at the scene. With the frequency of these missionary visits lately, she probably thinks I am converting.

As far as topics are concerned, we’ve mostly covered scripture and theology. I know mine and I know theirs and, because this isn’t my first rodeo, I know all the major Mormon talking points. I notice that the older of the two young men is becoming frustrated.

“Who taught you all of this?” he asks. “On whose authority did you receive this teaching?”

“There are current teachers in the Christian faith that I admire and trust,” I admit. “John Piper. Ravi Zacharias. Greg Koukl. And to some degree, John MacArthur and Russell Moore.” They look at me blankly. Of course they’ve never heard of these men. Their church teaches them to eschew any literature or teaching that isn’t approved by LDS authorities. “But even so, those men are only commentators on my source,” I say softly, raising the heavy leather bound book in my right hand, “Sola Scriptura.”

“What?” asks the younger.

“By scripture alone,” I say. “It’s all in here.”

The older shakes his head, and plays what I have come to know as the trump card of the LDS faith.

“Look at your church,” he says. “How can you claim that scripture presents a unified and consistent view of God when your churches can’t even agree on what that unified and consistent view is?”

Ouch. Burn. You know what? He is right.

“Your Christian church is a mess,” says the older Mormon, the taller of the two. “You can’t possibly know how much your scriptures have been corrupted and twisted by the church in the last 2000 years. You need a fresh revelation from god. We have that in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. We have the truth about Jesus as it was revealed to the prophet Joseph Smith. Leave your corrupted church. Come into the fold of the LDS. God has so much more he wants to show you.”

I take a deep breath and I shake my head, as if maybe a gentle agitation will set everything in order for what I am about to say. Do I start at the beginning? Do I hit all the high points? How can I be brief but thorough? Maybe I’ll just stick to the one most important point.

“For 2000 years,” I say, “the Christian church has never stopped agreeing on the most essential doctrine: Salvation through faith in Jesus the Messiah.”

“Yes,” says the Mormon. “But who is Jesus?”

“The answer to your question is the question itself,” I reply as all hopes of getting dinner on the table by seven o’clock vanish. And then, “Do you want to come inside? This is going to take a few minutes.”

—

The year is 67ish AD. You are wading among the throngs of Roman townsfolk in the colosseum, trying to find your seat. “XXXVIII,” reads your ticket. After fruitlessly searching among a stone carved row of benches, stepping on toes, tripping over the legs of those already seated, you realize that you are in the wrong section entirely. Somehow you took the wrong gate in.

An ancient mild obscenity leaves your lips in a mumble. The executions are about to commence. What if you miss it? What will you tell the others? They are huddled in someone’s kitchen somewhere in the East part of the city, their faces pressed into the dirt floors. Some of them are weeping. Some of them, like you, have set their mouths in a firm thin line. In their heads and in their hearts and with their lips they ask over and over, “God, must it be? Does it have to be?”

When you announced your intentions to attend the execution, no one volunteered to go with you. Your friend Aquila placed a single hand on your shoulder and simply said, “Do whatever you have to do.”

And so you find yourself elbowing your way out of section 37 and towards section 38. A trumpet sounds somewhere above you and more of the masses begin to find their seats. Perhaps if you squeeze down front you can cut across more quickly? You attempt the shortcut only to find that the particular passageway you just ducked through doesn’t lead you more quickly to section 38. Instead, you find yourself in a dark passage, relatively quiet compared to the shuffling masses you were previously in and cooler as well, since it is shaded from the sun.

Then you recognize her voice, breathless and small against the dull roar of the crowd outside, but still you know it. How could you not? She is your best friend. Your first friend. Your closest confidant for thirty years.

A cry rises from the masses outside, but in this little covered alley it is muffled and what you hear most clearly is her hushed voice saying something to someone. Where is she? On the other side of this wall. Can you get to her? Can you see her? No. Is it too late? Could you save her? Could you?

A Roman soldier yells an order, and then you hear another familiar voice, the deep intonation of her husband, the loud-mouthed fisherman that she loves so dearly. So then they are together? You find that your eyes are leaking tears, although you swore you wouldn’t.

Peter was the kind of man who spoke in absolutes with passion and zeal that would often burn your ears, but now you hear a tender wobbling in his voice. You are glad that they do not know you are near. This is too intimate for your presence.

“My love,” he says to his wife, and you imagine the big rough hand just barely trembling against her cheek. “Remember your God.”

Another shout from a soldier pierces your ears, a gate whines on its hinges, the crowd outside roars again. You slump down against the stone wall that separates you from your friends. You cry without sound and with deep uneven breaths as a dull pain in your chest deepens. You don’t have any words except a silent, “Please, God. Please.”

You can’t cry forever, though. Some minutes later, you find your mind again and emerge from the passageway. The sun blinds you. When your eyes have finally adjusted, you muster boldness and look toward the sand floor of the arena. There you make out blood that pools in places and trails off in others towards large arched iron gates. Thirteen Roman crosses, crude wooden beams bolted in large X’s, are lined down the center of the arena. Men hang on them bloody and lacerated and naked, gasping for breath.

You see that they’ve placed her husband at the center, not because of his importance to the faith (How could they even know? Why would they even care?) but certainly because of the shock value of his death. You know it is him hanging there, even at a distance, because instead of his hands at the top of the X and his feet at the bottom, his body is reversed.

“They can hang me upside down,” you remember him saying in that ever belligerent voice, “because I will not, I cannot, I do not deserve to die in the same way…”

You imagine that he repeated those words to the Roman guards. You wonder at how they obliged. With sarcasm? With indifference?

Now you see his intentions realized, his face swollen and purple, blood dripping down his forehead through matted hair and gathering in a still pool in the sand beneath his body. He looks to be already dead.

How did she die? You are glad that you do not know.

Nero is standing now, moving to the edge of the emperor’s box, and forty thousand heads are turning along with yours to see.

“These men,” he cries, “ are part of a cultic sect of Judaism. They eat their infants alive while engaging in incestuous relations among themselves.”

The crowd boo’s but smiles at the same time, clearly enjoying the licentious entertainment of the story.

You think about the evening last month when you and your now dead friend sat silently at the edge of a field. As the sky lost its light, you had begun to lose hope, but then finally you saw him walking quickly over the crest of the hill, a small bundle in his arms.

Your friend stood brusquely. You followed. The man approached and placed a wailing infant in your friend’s arms. Quickly, she unwrapped the folds of clothes and looked the baby over, stopping abruptly when her eyes saw between the legs.

“A boy?” she asked in confusion.

“Look lower,” said the man. By the color and folds of his robe, you could tell that he was a high-ranking servant in some important household.

Your friend noticed it then, as did you. The right foot was not really a foot. Instead, a gnarled little stump.

“I see,” said your friend gravely, and then, “Thank you.”

The man glanced to his left and to his right. “It is my pleasure,” he said, nervously but with conviction.

“You should go,” your friend responded. “But please, if perhaps among your kinsmen you hear of others…”

“My lady,” he answered, “I would be obliged to bring you every rejected child in all of Rome, but really, practically, you must know that you cannot save them all.”

It was moments like these, you recollect, that you better understood the love between your friend and her fiery husband.

“That may be true, my lord,” she responded, clipped and turning to leave as she spoke, “but that will not prevent me from trying. Peace be with you.”

“And also with you.”

When the man was safely back over the hill, your friend quickly drew back her dress and pulled the child to her breast. By the grace of God, she was still lactating from the birth of her last child, a provision that had proved itself more vital than any would have imagined. The cries of the baby boy subsided as he drank the first meal of his life.

Eaten? While engaging in an incestuous orgy? Hardly. The wicked minds of the masses will never cease to disappoint you. If anything, more and more of your people are forgoing marriage and, likewise, sex and the requisite families that sex creates altogether so that they can more fully devote themselves to endeavors such as feeding and caring for the kind of discarded outcasts that the Romans leave in the fields to die. To saving the world. To proclaiming, “The long awaited Messiah lived here among us, and you did not recognize Him…and the fulfillment of the prophecies isn’t as political as you thought it would be…it is better than that…” But if you stood right now and declared this, would they even hear you? Would they tear you apart?

At any rate, this execution is about something else anyway. It isn’t about whether your people eat children or save children. It isn’t even that your people preach a message that is unpalatable to Roman religion and mainstream Judaism. Far from it. And then as if on cue, as he has attained a sufficient level of booing from the crowds, Nero tells the biggest lie of the day, the one you knew was coming.

“This cult claims that it will destroy the world in fire!”

The tone of the booing has changed now. People are angry. As it so happens, a great fire has just recently destroyed ten of Rome’s fourteen districts. The word on the street is that Nero himself blazed the first building then played his harp as he watched the kingdom burn. In truth, the fire really started in an oil warehouse, but the people blame Nero, and Nero, in desperation to restore his image, blames an already disliked minority sect of Judaism. Nero blames you.

“This cult set a blaze to the glorious empire!”

The roar is deafening.

“This cult’s leader, who is dead—this cult’s leader claimed that he would destroy the city of Rome!”

More booing.

“And so his followers sought to burn your homes and your businesses in his name! Therefore I decree that anyone,” and the crowd screams in response, “anyone found among these cultist, these wayists, these so called followers of Jesus of Nazareth will die a death a thousand times worse than these men die today. Their bodies will light the streets of Rome at night. They will burn like the city they destroyed.”

Victory, it sounds like a cheer of victory from the crowd.

You look at your dead friend’s husband hanging upside down on his cross. You’ve got two things in your pocket. One is a necklace that your friend snapped off her neck and pressed into your palm before the soldiers took her.

“From my dowry,” she said in a rush. “Save it for my Anna.” And then you’d bolted out the back door with her child and one more in your arms. A necklace for Anna, only two years old. A necklace for Anna, now an orphan.

The second thing is a rolled piece of papyrus that contains a copy of the letter that Peter wrote to the fellow believers in Asia, and perhaps even more dear to you, a written account of the life of Jesus that Peter’s interpreter, Mark, penned.

Oh, Peter. There is so much hanging dead on that cross.

You’ve got two things in your pocket: A necklace for an orphan, and a roll of paper that might as well be her father’s last will and testament, his attempt to preserve a message for which he was willing to die upside down on a cross. You resolve to guard both these items from decay. For Anna. For Anna’s grandchildren. For a thousand future generations.

You resolve this with your life.

—

And for two thousand years, the church has done just that.

The Apostles had something specific they wanted to say. No one writes a story without an intended goal. The church preserved the intended goal.

Over the past week, I have attempted to here insert an incredibly brief and somewhat entertaining account of the history of the Christian church. I have failed miserably on the brief part. 20 pages in and I am only at year AD 246. I have since abandoned the effort.

I wish I could tell you all about what happens when Nero commits suicide, and about the destruction of the temple and the Jewish revolts and how the Christian church parted ways with Judaism (which may or may not have been a good thing.) I wish I could recount the tales of a troublesome preacher’s son named Marcion in the 2^nd century, and how, because of him, the church consequently adopted the Apostle’s Creed and the canon of scripture that we read even to this present day.

I want especially to tell you all about how the whacko Roman Emperor Constantine (who practiced a strange mix of pseudo-Christianity and sun-god reverence) blended, for the first time ever, Christianity with government (terrible horrible thing to do) and how that union didn’t really end until the year 1776 when some mostly non-Christian deists declared their independence from the Church and State of England.

I want to tell you how we got the words “catholic” and “pope”, and from whence practices such as penance and indulgences and confession sprang. I want to chronicle how the fathers in the early catholic church, who were once servant leaders of entire cities, became the institutionalized leaders of servants that they are today. I want to tell you how they got power hungry, and how they abandoned the faith yet remained in power, and how brave men and women spoke against them for the cause of preserving the Gospel of Jesus Christ…and how those men and women were ignored or killed or, occasionally, listened to.

I want to tell you about the monks who didn’t participate in the crusades. I want to tell you about the nuns who didn’t run and hide when the Bubonic plague killed 1/3 of the population. I want to tell you about what was going on historically in China during this time. I want to tell you about the heroes that persisted in the faith despite the corruption.

I’d like to mention a fiery monk, Luther, who started a revolution even though he didn’t mean to. He was just trying to make a point. I wish I could mention a Philosophy student at Cambridge University in England, William Tyndale, who translated the scriptures out of a long dead language (ancient Greek) and into the modern tongue so that everyone, not just the pope, could read them.

If only I could trace the post-protestant-reformation fracturing of the Catholic Church into the thousands of denominations that exist today. And perhaps remark on the language of the Methodist preacher George Whitefield from his 1750 sermon, “The Kingdom of God.”

“There are certainly Christians among all sects. I do not mean that there are Christians among those that deny the divinity of Jesus. I mean that there are Christians among other sects that may differ from us in the outward worship of God. Therefore, my friends, learn to be more catholic. (<–more on this in a minute) If you place the kingdom of God merely in a sect, you place it in that in which it doth not consist.”

I’d like to mention Pope John XXIII, who in 1962 made efforts to reunify the Catholics and the “separated brothers”—the Protestants. I want to remark on why that was a good thing and why it eventually failed.

I want to show you how, in the absence of centralized leadership, the Christian church will always have thousands of denominations. I want to make a point that this isn’t necessarily the best thing.

But…whew…see there? I didn’t really tell you anything and it took me an entire page. I can’t take three hundred pages to say 2000 years worth of words on the history of the Christian church here in my blog. There isn’t room.

But I will say this:

As a Christian, whether you’ve taken the time to get to know them or not, you are always surrounded by a great company of dead men and women. They are Apostles who hung on crosses in the Roman Coliseum. They are friends of the Apostles who went to their deaths carefully guarding the Apostolic writings. They are leaders in the early church, Jews and Gentiles and more who gave their lives to preserve the truth of Jesus’ message and to guard it from corruption. They are monks that campaigned against the Crusades and against slavery. They are Philosophy students who transcribed the Bible into English. They are nuns who gathered the dirty orphans off the streets of England. They are the mechanism that preserved the Gospel that found its way to your ears and changed your life, Christian.

You aren’t a lone ranger.

Don’t ever forget that.

In the churches of today, as we struggle against the push and pull of Post Modernism, there is a move to disdain the history of the church and the teaching of the church fathers. A high emphasis is placed on disregarding “religion” and focusing instead on “a personal experience with Jesus.” All the while forgetting one very important question that the first century church asked themselves and, 2000 years later, a Mormon missionary asked me underneath the archway of my front door.

“Yes but who is Jesus?”

The answer is found in the very concept that the modern church is rejecting. The answer is found first in the pages of scripture—and ancillary to that, in 2000 years worth of scholarship within the church to diligently preserve and protect the authors’ original intents.

The answer isn’t found in personal experience. The answer is found in Sola Scriptura.

Only three hundred short years after the death of Jesus, the early theologian Cyril of Jerusalem wrote a message to early believers that is still, I think, entirely relevant to the believers of our modern day.

“If ever you are sojourning in any city,” wrote Cyril, “inquire not simply where the Lord’s house is–for the sects of the profane also attempt to call their own dens ‘Houses of the Lord’–nor merely where the church is, but where is the Catholic Church. For this is the peculiar name of the holy body the mother of us all.”

The peculiar name. With 2000 years of loaded history behind it, the word catholic might drum up a variety of emotions and resentments today, but in the first few centuries it simply meant what it was: the Greek word katholike, meaning “of the whole.” It was used to distinguish the believers who accepted the Jesus of scripture from the other folks who believed in another form of Jesus, not found in the apostolic writings.

Katholike, catholic, referred to the church that existed invisibly within the hearts of saved men and women, uniting them under the common cause of knowing and loving and serving the Messiah that actually breathed and died and rose…and no other.

So perhaps now you understand better why a Methodist preacher in 1750 looked out at thousands of bickering denominations in America and cried, “Friends! Learn to be more catholic!”

I doubt very much that I, or my progeny, will ever see the true Christians of the world united again in one visible church, as the believers of the early centuries were. The Holy Roman Catholic Church of today (which is neither holy nor Roman…but I digress…) will most likely never again place the authority of scripture over the authority of the church government. The fracturing denominations of the Protestant Church, with often scant agreed upon leadership and few clear goals, will most likely never unite into one visible body that agrees on the core essentials of the Christian faith as dictated by scripture—because they can’t stop arguing over the non-essentials.

So, fellow believer in some random denomination (or perhaps you are one of those who rejects denominations altogether and simply goes to a community church), where does that leave me and you?

I could say a thousand different things on this subject, but in the interest of your already stretched attention span, I will say only one:

I would bet that on your bookshelf or coffee table or nightstand or car’s backseat there sits a Bible. Have you read it? Cover to cover? Or how about just one New Testament letter? How about Paul’s letter to the Romans?

Have you started at the beginning, “To all in Rome who are loved by God and called to be his holy people…” Have you paused to get some historical context on the believers in Rome, and the political, social, economic and religious climate?

Have you read it through to the end, “Now to him who is able to establish you in accordance with my gospel, the message I proclaim about Jesus Christ, in keeping with the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God, so that all the Gentiles might come to the obedience that comes from faith—to the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ! Amen.”

Have you paused along the way when you’ve come across some word or phraseology that doesn’t make sense to you? Have you sought out answers?

If you haven’t, my dear brother or sister in the faith, then you haven’t studied the Bible. Worse, you have put yourself at risk of believing in a Jesus that isn’t mentioned there. So many men and women died so that you could know who He really was. Why not honor their legacy? Why not study that book that you keep carrying around? I guarantee that it will change your life.

Sola Scriptura. This consistent cry of the historic church is yours to have. Know your Bible. And then when some book is published by a popular church teacher that says something contrary, or when your pastor preaches a sermon that takes a piece of text out of context, or when your friend from church says to you over dinner, “I highly doubt that Jesus would have said __________.” Then you will know what the bedrock foundation of the apostolic writings say, and you will be able to say, “Dear author, dear teacher, dear friend…I fear you are believing in another Jesus who never was.”

Christian, if you are going to label yourself with the name of Christ, then please—know Him.

I once thought theology was a dirty word synonymous with legalism. I now understand that theology is a 2000-year-old study about the “who” of Jesus. And it is incredibly important.

And beautiful. My goodness…so beautiful. In a dark and chaotic and painful world, I have only found hope in one Man and one God. He is written about on those pages.

Perhaps we will never have a katholike church that we can lay eyes on again, but that does not mean that, as individuals, we cannot know who Jesus was and pass that on to future generations. We can. We must. You can, Christian. You must.

My friends! Be more catholic!

What My Parents Taught Me

“I don’t know what your parents taught you…”

It is not a matter of question. The words drive themselves out of her mouth and across the phone line where they find me staring at my reflection in the hallway mirror. I note the creases in the skin of my forehead, deep and red from screwing up my face in consternation. I dismay at the bags under my eyes, hard earned from so many sleepless nights this week. Has she forgotten the wounded condition of my heart?

Usually I write for myself, but not entirely tonight.

Tonight I also write for her.

“I don’t know what your parents taught you,” she said.

So let me explain.

This is what my parents taught me.

—

I am ten years old and I can hear someone crying, no, wailing is more like it. Is that a person? It sounds like a person. But then again, it could be a cat. As a farm reared child, I know what a wailing cat sounds like. Wailing cats come with the territory. We’ve got at least a dozen of them roaming around here, most of them belonging to distant neighbors or perhaps they are strays that took up near the chicken houses to feast on the multitude of wharf-rats that roam the ditches at night. Every chance I can, I bring the stray cats tin-pie plates filled with warm milk and bits of bread. The strays aren’t supposed to eat the cat food that we feed our pet cat, Whitey, but sometimes I sneak it to them anyway.

“If you keep feeding them, they won’t eat the rats,” my mother has said.

“But what if they starve?” I am quite worried about that.

“They wouldn’t be here if they were starving,” she has said, but I am not convinced.

“They’ve got it better than most stray cats,” she has argued. “They’ve got a warm and dry barn to sleep in.” But I am still not convinced.

“We can’t afford to feed a dozen cats,” she has continued, but I am still not convinced.

It always ends in partial concession. “If they start to look like they’re starving you can feed them cat food. Otherwise, let them fend for themselves. Ok?”

“Ok,” but we both know well enough that I am going to keep bootlegging out tin pans of bread and milk and occasional cat food.

“You have always had a soft spot for strays,” her familiar voice, her hand brushing the bangs out of my eyes. Many years later, when I have taken in a stray of an entirely different nature and I am beginning to wonder why I ever made that choice, she will remind me of this. When I have all but forgotten about tin pans and milk and torn pieces of bread, she will remind me that I went to great lengths to give a dozen mangy cats a warm meal. And I will remember myself.

I am ten-years-old, and I hear again a noise that sounds like a cat crying, or maybe a cow braying in pain or maybe something else. If it’s a hurting cat, I want to find it. Maybe it is hungry. Maybe it needs a tin pan of milk and bread.

Dusk is settling heavy over the farm, the sky dark purple with just a tiny band of orange light at the edge of the clouds as the sun sinks further down and out of view. Like stadium lights, bright and white, the safety bulbs on the tin-sided chicken houses crackle to life. My flip-flopped feet trek to-and-fro across the course grey gravel and the hard packed earth, searching out the wailing animal, sending wolf spiders scurrying off into the shadows with their offspring huddled on their backs.

No luck around the chicken houses. Maybe the hay barn?

The sky is almost black now, and this does not excite me in the least. I will have to walk back to the house alone. The woods on the peripheral have lost all light, opaque in their darkness, perfectly masking whatever hides there. Coyotes. Mountain Lions. My dad even tells a story of a green-eyed panther that once stalked him near a creek while he was horseback riding. The horse spooked and fled the forest, with him still sitting on her back. And here I am without a horse and only my flip-flops. If I must flee, I won’t get far.

In the near darkness I approach the hay barn, a half-open building two stories tall with round bushels of hay stacked to the roofline. A scattering of stray cats recline in the crevices of the bales, stretching their legs, swishing their tales, dispassionately watching me as I intrude into and investigate their castle.

The noise has stopped now, but still I search. Nothing in the North corner of the barn near the tractor. Nothing in the South corner near the hay-baler attachment. Nothing in the West corner. But then I round into the East corner and there hidden among the bales, bowed with his face in the dirt, hands pressed flat on the ground is my father. His back is to me. He is motionless, except for the rise and fall of his back as he deeply breathes.

Is he ok?

“Dad?” I say tentatively, but he does not hear me.

“Dad?” I whisper again, but it gets no response.

Perhaps I am somewhere that I should not be. Am I going to be in trouble for this? Carefully I tiptoe out of the barn, cringing as the metal door whines on its hinges behind me. Should I run back to the house, quickly, before anyone discovers me? Maybe I will, but it is dark and I am scared. But I have no other choice.

“Heather?” And just as swiftly as I meant to flee, I am found out. I startle, stop in my tracks, turn to see him. The skin on his face is streaked with dirt and the clean negative left by tears. The tracks run up his forehead, like he has been crying upside down.

“Dad?” I say uncertainly. “Are you ok?”

His response is, “Were you just in the barn?”

I nod guiltily. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” he says.

But I say it again. “I’m sorry.”

He sighs heavily, his back slumping further towards the ground. Crossing to me, his arm drapes across my shoulders, his free hand pats the crown of my head.

“Dad, are you ok?”

Another heavy sigh.

“No sweetheart. I am not.”

“Is that why you were crying?” I ask.

He is silent for a moment, staring at the blank space in front of him as if it looks unpleasant.

“I am very sad,” he says lowly, “and I was crying out to God.”

“You were praying?”

“I was praying.”

What about? He doesn’t tell me, but it could be any painful or terrifying thing. When I am grown and walking through the darkest moments in my life, I will look in the mirror and on my own face identify the same hollow eyes, the same creased forehead, the same pained expression of my father’s in 1993. And I will remember where I found him. On his knees.

“I’m scared to walk back to the house in the dark,” I say to him. “Will you walk with me?”

He glances at his watch.

“I have to check the chickens first,” he says. “Do you mind waiting outside? You can’t go in there with your flip-flops on.”

“I know,” I say. “I’ll wait.”

So I stand alone in the white glow of the safety lights, watching moths and gnats beat their wings against the bulbs and die. I am ten. I do not yet know the pain that my life will hold. Or the joy. When I am twenty-two, I will feel a vague numbness in my feet, the first effects of nerve damage from thirteen years worth of chronic disease. In horror, I will have my first adult realization that this illness is going to kill me. Give it forty years, and it will wear my liver down to nothing. I will die before my peers.

Falling to my knees, I will wail like a cat before God. And I will be comforted.

My father exits the last chicken house and finds me underneath the light. He smells of ammonia and corn feed.

“You ready to go?” he asks.

“Yep,” I say, reaching for his hand.

And we walk the gravel road back home in the dark.

My father taught me to say my prayers.

—

This particular crowd of gals can get a bit gossipy. I am fourteen sitting in a living room with at least ten other females, including my mother. We are probably all related, since everybody in this town is somebody’s cousin.

So far the discussion has included the skimpyness of Julie Jones’ skirt at church last Sunday (Did you see how short it was?) and the fact that Joe Jackman is now working two jobs (two!) to support his family because his wife is pregnant with their sixth child. (Six children! In that tiny little house. You’d think he’d have the sense to get snip-snipped or she’d have had her tubes tied by now.) The discussion has also included other things, less gossipy.

My fourteen-year-old self is sitting on the sofa between two grown women. My mother is across the room in an armchair. Most everyone seems old to me. I do not realize that my mother in her mid-thirties is young. I do not realize that the two old women on either side of me are young as well.

The conversation moves around us. My mother’s face opens up excitedly when she talks about sewing new curtains for her living room. It closes like a door when the discussion turns to whether Joe Jackman can afford to send six children to college.

“Irresponsible!” says someone.

“It’s called family planning,” says another.

But my mother says nothing, and in her silence and lack of expression I learn that the size of Joe Jackman’s family is the business of Joe Jackman and his wife and no one else.

Conversational topics of women are like tangled balls of colored yarn. Start pulling on a blue string and it draws out a red one. Start pulling on the red one and a yellow one comes out behind it. One woman pulls the yellow string until it snags out a green one. In that way, the discussion moves to how much time it takes us all to get ready in the morning. The general consensus is that more than fifteen minutes is unacceptable.

“A little mascara and lipstick and I’m out the door. I don’t have time to stand in front of the mirror.”

“Mary Moesby takes an hour to curl her hair! I would never take an hour to curl my hair!”

My mother is silent again, but I surprise myself and decide to speak. I tentatively take the ball of yarn and pull the string.

“It takes me forever to get ready,” I submit, the words floating from my mouth to the center of the room where they hang over the coffee table like an offering to the god of dialogue. “My hair is so thick it takes half-an-hour to blow it dry. And then I have to straighten it. And I can’t ever decide what I want to wear.”

Silence fills the room. My offering hangs in the air, as of yet unaccepted. Did I say something wrong? I was only being honest.

My mother’s face is a window to her soul. It is open and looking directly at me and I think that maybe she is proud of me, although I do not know why.

“So how long does it take you to get ready?” asks a girl with long black hair. She is someone’s daughter and around my age.

“Oh, I don’t know. An hour? Maybe two?”

I can hear the low rush of the air conditioning blowing through a vent in the floor. The young girl with long black hair says nothing. Everyone says nothing. But my mother’s face is a window to her soul and it is looking at me. She breaks the silence.

“Heather likes to take her time in the morning,” she says. “She likes to sit in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and read. She likes to gather her thoughts while it is still quiet. It really is a wonderful way to start the day.” With the way she says the word wonderful, no one in here will dare have the confidence to question it. Yes. It is a wonderful way to start the day.

I have been rescued.

What she just said is not entirely the truth. Most mornings before school I agonize over my outfit, I redo my lipstick four times, I fret over needless things. But once, just once, I have made a pot of coffee and sat at the breakfast table and been the young woman that she just described. My mother has seen past the self-conscious teenager to what I really want to be, and she has rescued me from a room of catty women. She rescues me.

The conversation moves back to the length of Julie Jones’ skirt, and I and my mother close the doors of our faces and we stay silent.

My mother taught me to be kind to others.

—

Angry. I am so angry. I am sixteen and I am pinned to the dining room floor, struggling violently with my father. He is on top of me, literally, in attempt to control me. I have kicked him thrice in the shins. If I could get my hands out of his grip, I would punch him.

“I am going to the party!” I shriek for the zillionth time. The words are a bit garbled since my mouth is half squished into the floor. I can taste the Pledge hardwood cleaner.

Dad doesn’t even say no. He has already said it more times than either of us can count. Instead, he keeps me in his grip. I flail, I kick a few more times and finally I grow still underneath him. The dining room falls silent.

“You remind me of a horse I once had,” he says, his speech part muffled into the back of my head. “Every time I tried to put a saddle on her, she would kick me.”

“I don’t want to wear a saddle,” I angrily say.

“I know you don’t,” he says.

“Let go of me,” I demand.

“Honey, you are sixteen. There is no way I can let go of you right now. You aren’t ready yet.”

I roll my eyes. “I wasn’t being metaphorical. Let me up off the floor.”

“If I do, will you promise not to run out the front door?”

I sigh. “Ok.”

“You promise?”

“I said ok!”

We both clamber up from the hardwoods, and my father takes his stance between the front door and me. It is dark outside and I watch a streetlamp click on out the window.

“I’m not going to run,” I defend, but in truth I might if given the chance.

My father rubs his reddened shins. “You got me good,” he says.

“I hate you,” I spit.

“I know you do, but I need you to listen to me right now.”

Rolling my eyes, I prepare to not listen, but he launches into the following monologue anyway. As it turns out, it is brilliant and will stay with me forever.

“I need you to know how much I love you,” he says. “You can kick me, you can scream at me, you can say you hate me but I still love you. You’re my daughter. You are my firstborn. I can’t ever stop.”

I stare intently at a knot in the hardwood floors, and he continues.

“You are also the most stubborn and independent woman that I have ever met in my life,” he shakes his head like this baffles him. “I suppose you take after your father. You remind me of myself.”

I am still fixated on that knot in the floor. If you stare at it long enough, it kind of looks like George Washington in profile.

“This is important,” he says, but I am sixteen and barely listening. “I need you to know there is nothing wrong with that stubborn streak. There is nothing wrong with that independence. God gave you your personality for a reason. I don’t want you to ever be ashamed of it.”

My eyes jerk up to meet his. This is new.

“You’ve just got to learn how to be stubborn about the right things. You have got to learn how to take all that passion and turn it towards things that really matter. You have to submit it to God. You are so strong that if you spend your energy on worthless pursuits, you will dig a hole in the ground that you will never be able to get out of. Do you understand what I am saying?”

I nod. I understand perfectly. In fact, I am already digging a few holes with my life, but I have been too prideful to admit it.

“Please,” he says in earnest, “let me raise you. Let me put a saddle on you for the next few years until you are old enough to be on your own.”

“I don’t want to wear a saddle,” I say, less angry now. “I want to be free.”

“I understand,” he says. “But wild horses that run alone starve in the wilderness. You need discipline and you need passionate purpose in your life. Trust me. Those friends of your’s that are running wild will self-destruct eventually. Just wait and see.”

I stare at the floor again. I can’t decide whether or not I believe him.

“You are better than that,” he says in the softest tone of the night. “You are meant for more.” Suddenly he is hugging me and I am letting him hug me. I am burying my face in his shirt and thinking how much I love him. But since I just told him that I hate him, I don’t reckon I can flip-flop and tell him that I love him just yet, so I keep silent.

“I am going to lock this front door,” says my father. “Please, don’t walk out of it tonight.”

“Ok,” I sigh.

“And don’t ever kick me again.”

Slowly I walk up to my room where I lock my own door and listen to angsty music on the radio for three hours until the house falls silent and everyone is asleep. At some point while the DJ is jabbering, I realize that I am sorry for kicking my dad in the shins. Probably, I should go let him know.

Through the still moonlight, I tiptoe down the stairs and across the house to my parents’ doorway, trying to not creak the floorboards as I go. The door to their bedroom is cracked open two inches and I sheepishly place my mouth near the opening.

“Dad?” I whisper, but get no response. As I push the door open, I inwardly wish it would whine on its hinges to announce my arrival, but it stays silent so I clear my throat instead.

“Dad?” I say as I step towards the bed, but the quiescence is not broken so I lean my head near his face and try a little louder.

“DAD.” But still nothing. He is out cold.

Oh. He is out cold. He cannot hear me right in front of his face, so if I were to walk out the front door, crank my car and go to the party…

It is midnight now. The party will be in full swing. The music will be loud. Everyone will be drunk. In about an hour, my best friend will need me to hold her hair while she pukes.

I could go if I wanted to.

But do I want to? Have I ever really wanted to?

I lean down and kiss my father on the forehead, catching a whiff of his familiar smell, gasoline and fresh earth.

“I love you,” I whisper. “And I’m sorry.”

Then I tiptoe back to my room where I sleep until the morning.

My father taught me to respect authority.

—

What else was taught? A million other things in between.

That sometimes people smile when they are sad, and cry when they are happy.

That we are all fallen humans, so forgiveness is mandatory. Second chances, however, are not necessarily.

That I must think before I speak, but by all means, I must speak.

That where no oxen are, the stall is clean. But there is much value in the strength of an ox.

And more more much more in between.

—

Is this terrifying? I had never expected it to be. I am nineteen-almost-twenty and I am struggling to get one last shoe into the trunk of my car. The little Toyota is packed to its roof with all my clothes, all my makeup, all my posters, all my books. The only empty space is in the driver’s seat. Even if I wanted to, I could not take anything else with me. There is room left for me and me alone.

Finally, I wedge in the shoe at a forty-five degree angle and, with effort, force the trunk closed. The car will not give to hold more, so I slump back towards the house feeling heavier than I meant to feel. Shouldn’t I be light? Finally, after years of striving for my independence, I am an adult. Shouldn’t I feel free?

Walking into the house, I look intently up the stairs towards my childhood bedroom. Through its open door, I see dust motes floating in a sunbeam that streaks through the dormer window. Should I make one last walk through? But I can’t. It is empty, the closet bare, the space under the bathroom sink vacant. I do not live here anymore, so instead I sink down on the bottom stair and hide my face in my palms.

Here come the tears.

With a basket of laundry in her arms, my mother wanders past and stops dead in her tracks, assuming an expression of utter bafflement.

“What is happening right now?” she asks cautiously, comically, like she does not trust herself to understand.

“I don’t even know,” I sob. I want her to sink down next to me and let me bury my face into the crook of her neck, but instead she remains standing with the laundry basket on one hip and her head cocked to the right side in wonder.

Levelly she says, “The only alternative is living at home forever. Do you want to live at home forever?”

Through my tears, I laugh. We both already know the answer.

“Then you have to go,” she says. “This is how growing-up works.”

Not quite the comfort I expected, but still I nod through my tears. I understand.

“Do you remember when you were six years old,” she asks, adjusting a sock that is about to fall over the plastic lip of the basket, “and you packed that little book bag with a pillow and Kraft sliced cheese and tried to run away from home?”

I look at her and nod again. Of course I remember.

“Well, you weren’t ready then,” she says, “but you are ready now. You are a fine young woman and you are going to do well in the world.”

My father wanders in then, still holding a greasy rag from where he just checked the oil level in my car. He too stops in his tracks and looks confused.

“What is happening right now?” he asks, to which mom smiles wryly and I shrug.

“I’m scared to leave,” I say.

It starts as a small chuckle, and then Dad is laughing so deep that you cannot even hear it.

“Baby girl,” he says eventually, still in baffled amusement, “you have been trying to move out since you were six years old.”

“I know,” I sob. “I don’t understand it either.”

Then he sinks down on the landing and wraps me in his arms. Mom follows on my other side, and the three of us embrace and I cry and I laugh at the same time. Acutely, I am aware that something is changing in this moment. We have begun the move away from the child and her authority figures. Now we edge towards the friendship that only an adult daughter and her mother and her father can have. More suddenly than expected, I am grown.

We hug on the stair landing until I am done crying and we are all done laughing.

My father asks, “Are you ready?”

And I say, “I’m ready.”

Together, the three of us walk out to my car where I climb in and turn the key and the engine rumbles to life. I am told to stop at the gas station on the corner to fuel up, and will I give them a call when I get there?

“I’ll call you,” I say, and I turn out of the driveway with the rearview image of almost twenty years and my father’s arm around my mother’s shoulders, the two of them growing smaller and smaller in the mirror until I breach the rise of a hill and they are gone from sight. Then it is just me and the packed car and the radio and what lies ahead.

My parents taught me how to grow up.

They taught me more than I could ever write with pen and paper

but give me children of my own one day, and in much the same way

I will write it in their lives. That’s my plan.

I don’t know what your parents taught you.

But this is what my parents taught me.

If I Die Young

This song has haunted me for the past few days.

If I die young bury me in satin lay me down on a bed of roses


sink me in the river at dawn send me away with the words of a love song

The sharp knife of a short life, well


I’ve had, just enough time

It was written by The Band Perry, although the version I can’t get out of my head is a cover done by these guys, Michael Henry and Justin Robinett: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQoFLrZ5C3M

Did you listen? Are you haunted now too?

I have recently known a few friends to die young, and perhaps that is the reason this melody has taken up residence with me, playing quietly on repeat in the still areas of my mind for days.

No one is ever expecting the phone call.

There is a voicemail on my mobile phone, a friend’s voice and her only words, “Hi. I really need to tell you something. It’s about… Call me, ok?” And in the restrained calm of her intonation, I hear warning sirens wailing underneath.

Someone is dead. I know this from only the clipped and generic message. I have an assumption on who it must be, but when I call and receive the news, I am surprised. It isn’t the casual acquaintance I assumed. Instead, it is a friend and she was only 27 years old. My age.

Grief.

Hits me like a tidal wave, like a stinging wall of water. And because this is not my first ride on the undertow of mourning, I don’t even fight it. I just let it cover me, let its tide pull me out into the ocean and then slowly drag me back to shore—exhausted and out of breath, soaked through to the bone, cold.

“What do we do now?” asks my husband once I have relayed the message.

“Now we mourn,” I say, and we do.

In the small hours of the night, 1am, 2am, my heart is raw from beating so hard and so loud. I crawl out of bed by the light of the moon and fumble around in the kitchen cupboard. Reaching for the highest shelf, I strain on my tiptoes until my fingers latch onto what they are searching for: a spiral bound church cookbook from some inconsequential little Baptist congregation in Georgia. The publish date, June of 1983, is the year I was born. My mother bought it when she was pregnant, saved it for twenty-four years and gifted it at my wedding. In the three years that I have been a married woman, I haven’t cracked it open once, preferring instead my heavy cloth-bound and onion-skinned Gourmet Vegetarian volumes 1 and 2.

But tonight in the dim grey of the moonlit kitchen, Gourmet Vegetarian feels dense and anonymous against the tips of my fingers. Instead, I pull down the flimsy paper church cookbook, flip the yellowed pages and find casseroles: green bean, squash and sweet potato, and pineapple upside down cake. Each recipe attributed to some woman who was cooking in her home and attending Enon Baptist Church in 1983. I see my maiden name on every third page or so, and I wonder about these likely relatives that I surely met as a child. Did they hold me? Did I ever eat a slice of their Famous Coconut Cake from page 36?

All directions for my chosen recipes call for a large cast iron skillet, which I don’t even own. So I trek out to the 24-hour grocery store in my pajamas where I buy a round hunk of iron that is so heavy it takes both hands to lift it and lug it up to the front of the store. Then I trek back home. And I cook.

Milk. Eggs. Flour. Butter. Salt. Sugar. Vegetables, chopped, sliced, diced. Mix some. Blend others. Roll. Repeat.

And I cook.

Husband walks in the kitchen sometime around 5am and takes a look at the dough on my arms, the flour in my hair, the ten or so empty cans of condensed soup scattered across the counters. He refills his water glass from the sink, kisses me gently on the forehead and says, “I am so sorry, love.” And I cry for a long minute in his arms, my tears leaving streaks in the dusting of flour on my cheekbones.

If I die young bury me in satin 
lay me down on a bed of roses


sink me in the river at dawn 
send me away with the words of a love song

The sharp knife of a short life, well


I’ve had, just enough time

A TV is droning as static noise in the background of a doctor’s office waiting room. I am sitting and waiting for a nurse to call my name, wishing to the core of my soul that I could find the remote control and switch the mindless chattering box off or at the very least turn the channel. A female talk show host interviews a man who recently had a near death experience via a bicycle accident.

The man gestures broadly with his hands, and his eyebrows wobble up and down with excitement.

“You see!” he says, “I realized that life only exists because of death! And death only exists because of life! One cannot exist without the other. The problem is that we cling to life and we reject death. But death is natural. Death is holistic. Death is really all about life and so death is good! When you realize that death is good, you can truly start to enjoy life. If you live every moment so as to make the most of it, death is no longer the enemy. Death becomes your friend. You see?”

No, I do not see.

The morning after I bake half of the Enon Baptist Church cookbook by the light of the moon, I visit my dead friend’s widower.

The flesh on his face looks loose, like he lost twenty pounds in the course of a weekend and maybe he has. His eye sockets are sunk and tinged a purple that fades outwards by degrees from his lids to the white of his cheeks and his forehead.

Upon seeing the casseroles piled and teetering in my arms, he immediately leans his chest over the porch rail and vomits absolutely nothing into the grass.

“I am so sorry,” he says, covering his mouth with his hand. “I am so very sorry.”

“No, you have nothing to be sorry for. I’ll put these back in the car.”

“I can’t eat.”

“I know you can’t. I’m sorry. I just didn’t know what else to do so,” I look down at the dishes in my arms, “I cooked.” Suddenly I understand every casserole-and-cake-laden funeral home I ever attended as a child.

I hastily place the dishes into the back seat of my car and rejoin him on the porch.

“This is not right,” he moves his head slowly from left to right at intermittent moments in the silence. “This is not supposed to happen. This is not ok,” he says.

“No,” I mutter, shaking my head with him. “This is completely unnatural.”

And as if I have spoken something new that has not already been said, he looks at me with wide wild eyes.

“It is unnatural,” he says resolutely, now moving his head up and down in agreement. And then silence.

It is very difficult to watch a twenty-nine year old man waste away in the absence of his wife.

“I wish we’d had a baby,” he says, “wish I had a piece of her left here with me. I wish—”

So here is what holistic death looks like. Would the guy on the talk show make his same speech today, in the face of this tragedy? I imagine him telling my friend that, if only his wife had lived her life more fully, then she would have indeed welcomed her death at 27 years of age. And if only my friend viewed death as a natural extension of life, then he would not be grieving this untimely loss.

No.

Perhaps a person who is lucky enough to keep his own life should not be the authority on losing it. Instead, I will trust the opinions of those who are in the trenches of grief, those who are wrestling with the reality of death even now. Let’s ask the man who lost the love of his life. Does it feel good?

No.

Does it feel natural?

No.

So what is it then?

That I am only various forms of carbon? That my friend is just an organism and as she decays in the ground, she simply becomes part of the earth again? All that love and hate and life experience, to dust.

Perhaps that view is acceptable to those who haven’t experienced the loss of a loved one, but those of us in the throes of grief always tell a different story. We rail against death. We hate it. We grieve it. We shake our fists at it. We look to the sky. We speak of reunion, one day.

Rarely do we quote Darwin, and for good reason. Darwin offers no hope in the face of death. Only decay and dust.

As I sit on a leather sofa with five other friends in the widower’s living room, I can clearly hear the voices of my critics. “Religion is a crutch for the feeble minded” and “The concept of an afterlife is something we invented to make ourselves feel less anxious about death.” I can clearly hear those phrases because, just a few weeks prior to my friend’s death, the people sitting around me were voicing them.

But now as we sit in grief, it is different.

Two here were raised in somewhat Catholic homes, but really they know very little about Catholicism. It was abandoned as soon as they were old enough to think on their own, with only quiet objections from their mothers. The third and fourth are intellectual agnostics. The fifth is a Mormon. Our grieving friend was raised in a Presbyterian home, but readily set those beliefs to the side when he graduated high school and has barely glanced at them since. I am the lone professing Christian in the room, and come to think of it, I am the lone Christian in this entire group of friends.

The grieving widower looks around wildly. The first four friends have pained expressions on their faces and pass the phrase “I don’t understand” back and forth. I join in the passing, because I too don’t understand why this happened. I have no idea.

“I know she is still here somewhere,” says the widower. “I can feel her.”

The apostate Catholics and the intellectual agnostics all nod readily in agreement, and I think they really mean it.

The Mormon and I do not nod and this irritates me because, of all the people to be sharing beliefs with in this room, I do not want to be in agreement with the cult member (not that anyone has noticed our still and unshaking heads, but still…)

I try not to be annoyed with the Mormon, but she looks eager and this doesn’t help matters. I can see her theology in the expression on her face. The LDS view is that suffering in this life is designed to make us more morally perfect before god. The better we cope and keep our act together, the more brownie points. There are also demerits for bad behavior. The eternal scales.

Our dead friend lived a pretty good life, so she probably will not receive eternal damnation by the Mormon god assigned to this world (punishment, yes, but eternal damnation, no.) The biggest bummer is, because our dead friend was not a member of the LDS Church, she won’t get to become a Mormon god of her own world in her subsequent life. Unless, of course, her widower would like to join the LDS Church and have a properly authorized and preformed proxy baptism on our dead friend’s behalf. Then our dead friend will get a shot at being a good Mormon and having her own world in her life after next. Oh the convenience of the LDS church!

If only our widower friend would accept Joseph Smith’s interpretation of Jesus. And join an LDS church. And receive a properly authorized baptism. And receive a proxy baptism for our dead friend. And strictly adhere to the LDS code of conduct (No alcohol! No nicotine! No caffeine! No skipping church! No lying! Demerits! Demerits!) In return, the Mormon church will offer a strong interpersonal network of other Mormons to rely on for socialization and especially for further Mormon education from proper Mormon authorities.

Are you exhausted from reading all of that? I am exhausted from writing it. Mormonism is a lot of hard work.

We all sit on the leather sofas. The Mormon with her answers. The apostate and agnostics in hysterical confusing grief.

And me.

Also in hysterical confusing grief. There are still pieces of dough under my fingernails.

My dead friend’s husband has a million questions: What do I do now? How do I sleep alone in the bed we shared? How do I sleep at all? How do I get the fork off the plate and into my mouth? I know I will never love again. Will I ever love again? It hurts.

I don’t have those answers. All I have is

Hope.

There is hope in Christ.

When there is nothing else, there is hope in Christ. Everything ugly and awful and painful and wrong was conquered on the cross and will meet its end in Christ—the One who redeems. All the messed up world groans under a curse, but it will be redeemed. And absolutely everything will be ok.

Sure, it sounds like the end to a fairy tale. But then, we have the stuff of fairy tales woven into our existence. There is something in the human heart that desperately seeks happily ever after. Forever after. We don’t like our stories to end in grief. We crave happy endings.

Some say this is because we are feeble minded. But maybe instead, it is just how we were created. To desire happily ever after. To conquer death, because that is the end to the story that was written long before we ever breathed or walked or spoke.

We were never meant to die, and we are all dying. And it hurts.

But there is hope in Christ and Him alone. And it will all be ok.

That is the truth of Christianity. And if you have that you have everything and need no other thing.

Hope in Christ is the end.

And the beginning.

If I die young bury me in satin lay me down on a bed of roses


sink me in the river at dawn 
send me away with the words of a love song

The sharp knife of a short life, well


I’ve had, just enough time

I want to say all of this to my grieving friends–but I don’t get the chance.

When the Mormon tries to just barely breach the taboo subject of god or gods or God, I watch the faces around the room close like fists. We can’t discuss this today, and most likely, this is for the best. After all, we are nursing the gaping holes in our hearts. We are living in the fog of grief. Who cares about philosophically sound reasoning? the historic credibility of the Judeo-Christian scriptures? the recent trend of agnosticism? the historic trend of belief in a god—only which one to pick? The issue of evil? The issue of pain and suffering? The potential problems with an omnipotent God and narcissism? A triune God and its logical philosophical conclusions? Blah blah blah blah.

In the light of our pain, who cares about the semantics?

I certainly don’t.

But I wish, oh I wish, I could say to every bleeding heart around me:

There is hope in Christ.

Hope.

A penny for my thoughts, oh no, I’ll sell them for a dollar


They’re worth so much more after I’m a goner


And maybe then you’ll hear the words I’ve been singing


Funny when you’re dead how people start listening
—-

—-

—-

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Care to know more? Check out my favorite apologist, Dr. Ravi Zacharias, on what it means to be human:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdytBEOj0M0
www.rzim.org

Leaving Georgia

Husband and I drove out of town in our SUV packed floor to ceiling with all the miscellany we couldn’t fit on the moving truck plus our two big mutts of dogs panting furiously in the summer heat. A few hours ago, I drank my last morning cup of coffee outside on the tiny deck of the miniscule and over-priced apartment that housed me during my first few years of full-time adulthood. The deck furniture had already been bubble wrapped, banged down three flights of stairs and hoisted onto the Enterprise Rent-a-truck, so I sat on the floor sipping my Starbucks and picking at the splintering wood under my legs, attempting unsuccessfully to stop a mental recitation of the lines that ended Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty; I’m free at last.

Now we drove away, the setting of my youth waning in the rearview mirror.

Somewhere back in the distance was a rusty fence gate separating a dirt road from thirty acres of green grass pasture hedged in by an impossible number of pine trees, the terrain rolling and dipping to shallow creeks, a few hundred cows chewing their cud—my childhood. Somewhere north of that was a brown brick building on a hill with an adjacent lacquered basketball gym and a green-lawned football field sunk deep into a gulf of bleachers—my high school.

High school. On the first day, mom had put a sack lunch in my backpack and told me how beautiful I looked (just absolutely beautiful and I am so so proud of you) and after one last fidget with the straps on my book bag and the fifth engulfing hug of the morning she’d sent me forth with the firm instructions, “Just be yourself.”

Just be yourself.

But who in the world was I?

I wasn’t a cheerleader. I wasn’t an athlete. I wasn’t a true academic, always excelling in English but falling over math. I wasn’t a slut. I wasn’t a druggie. I wasn’t a mean girl. I wasn’t a holier-than-thou good girl.

Perhaps it was grander than I realized, the fact that I didn’t fit neatly into any of those categories. But the problem with not fitting neatly into a category when you are in high school is that you have no one to eat lunch with.

School lunch: grab a tray. Walk down the linoleumed aisle lined with glass fronted cases and heat lamps. Survey the wares on display and pick the least disgusting thing (usually pizza.) Pay. Good. You’re doing fine. Now for the tricky part. Do not panic. Do NOT panic. Keep your head up. Keep your shoulders square. Keep your breathing even. Do not trip. Do not drop your tray.

Be cool. Survey the lunchroom. Find your landing spot.

In the right corner is a crowded little table of six with their heads tucked down staring intently at something. They are each either overly large or overly small for their ages, with no size in between. You know they are playing with their Pokémon cards.

The thing is, you’re ok with Pokémon cards. Your younger brother (who falls into the overly-small-for-his-age category) plays Pokémon cards and you’ve tried your hand at it a time or two. You kind of enjoy Pokémon, or if not enjoy, then you at least respect it as a form of entertainment. The smallest of the table’s occupants, a waif of a boy wearing unbecoming glasses and an unfortunate smattering of acne, gives you a sheepish smile and you realize, that’s Danny. Danny asked you to slow dance at the 8th grade Rec Department sock hop and you said yes, not because you liked him, but because his hands were shaking and you thought, “If I say no, it will crush him.” And you’re not the kind of girl who crushes guys like Danny, even though you could.

You smile back at Danny but you don’t cross the room to him because, even though you don’t want to hurt him, you don’t want to encourage him either. You notice that sitting protectively and perhaps a bit too close to Danny is an overly-large-for-her-age girl. She scowls at you, showing the neon green bands of her braces and you silently wish her well on requiting her love, and then you turn away. You can’t land at that table.

There by the exit is a group of seven, all clad in Marilyn Manson t-shirts, baggy black jeans with swagged silver chains and greasy heads of hair. There are skateboards strewn about their feet. At first you think they’re making eye contact with you, but then you realize that no, they’re just staring into the fluorescent lit space over your head and underneath the ceiling. Occasionally one of them will say something and a round of subdued laughter will rise up like a gentle wave from the table before it falls back into silence. You reckon you’re too sober to sit there.

Your eyes pass table after table, each of them clustered with their own kind like orbiting planets with their own distinct civilizations in miniature. On this planet live the scholarly intellectuals. Can you sit with them? No. On that planet live the athletes. Can you sit with them? You actually hate sports, so no. On this planet live the computer geniuses. Can you sit with them? You know a little html but not enough to carry on a conversation, so no. And on that planet live…oh dear…now you’ve come to that planet. The worst planet. And it is the worst because it is the best.

They all have nice hair, healthy skin, straight teeth, expensive jeans and even more expensive shoes. There is nothing wrong with having all of those things. Of course not. You desire to have those things yourself, and come to think of it, you already do. Or at least, you’ve got three of the five. You’re sixty percent of the way to being one of them. Sixty percent!

But then you have to shake your head to clear it, because you know that isn’t true. It takes more than nice hair, healthy skin, straight teeth, expensive jeans and even more expensive shoes to be a part of this group. It takes some other intangible thing.

Others have surmised that the secret ingredient is confidence, but you don’t agree with people who hold that opinion. It is something less admirable. You’ve sat at that table before. You’re wise to the way this works.

You’ve eaten your lunch right beside the girl who wears the most expensive shoes of them all. You’ve watched her scanning the peripheral of the lunchroom like a hawk, looking for prey. You’ve felt a pang in your heart as she’s swooped in for the kill.

“Oh my god oh my god oh my god,” she’s squawked as she punches your arm and everyone else’s arms around her, “look at that.”

And you and everyone else at the table have turned to look at what she’s gawking at and your eyes have landed on that overly-large-for-her-age girl that was sitting at the Pokémon table next to Danny.

“Look at her plate. Look at her plate!” and you’ve looked and you’ve seen that the specified girl has purchased five slices of pepperoni pizza and they are stacked and teetering like a greasy cheesy tower on her tray as she precariously makes her way across the lunchroom to her friends and their game of cards.

You hear a murmur of words at your lunch table. “Gross.” “Slob.” “Dork.” “Gay.” “Fat.” “Cow.” “Fat.” They cackle. They hoot. They all double over in forced hysterics and you can hear something abnormal in the way they laugh. It sounds like, “Ha ha ha ha. I’m so glad, ha ha, so glad we’re not, ha ha laughing at me right now.”

You don’t join in. You can’t join in. And yet you don’t know how to stop this. There is a pained expression plastered on your face that is half disbelief and half forgiveness toward your so-called friends. You know you should not be forgiving them so easily and you hate yourself for it. You are letting them get away with it. Everyone always lets them get away with it.

You steal a glance at the mean girl with the expensive shoes and you notice that you are thinner than she is. In fact, everyone at this table is thinner than she is. If someone at this table is fat, it’s the girl with the expensive shoes. But there is no denying it, the girl with the tray full of pizza is fatter. And so the girl with the expensive shoes points and cackles and all but screams, “Don’t look at me. Don’t judge me. Look at her! Judge her!” and people do.

So the question is, what do you do? Do you eat lunch there, and if not there, where? Because the table you pick is going to define you. It’s going to pull you into its orbit and you’re going to circle around in that orbit until you’re done with high school. So what do you do?

Here’s what I did.

One day at that lunch table (ugh I HATED that table and I think that table hated me, but still I didn’t know where else to sit) the girl with the most expensive shoes had taken advantage of an opportunity. A fellow orbiter in our strange universe, a beautiful girl with pale blue eyes and an abusive alcoholic father whom she loved and defended with a truculent passion, was out sick. Or else, was out with a black eye. Either way it was all the same, the girl with the most expensive shoes saw this as the perfect opportunity for defamation. She zeroed in on the absentee friend’s most obvious flaw (other than the abusive father which was an off limits subject, or else, maybe the girl with the expensive shoes didn’t know or care to know): her undeveloped chest.

“She’s so flat!” “Flat!” “No boobs!” “Flat!”

And perhaps I was finally becoming an adult, as my mother had assured me would happen eventually, because for some reason I knew exactly what I wanted to say and I actually said it.

“Stop,” I said emphatically, and a dozen faces turned my way with wide eye-shadowed eyes and slightly agape lip glossed mouths. The girl with the expensive shoes was momentarily silent, and her off-balance gave me a shot of confidence. So I plowed on.

“How can you judge her boobs? She isn’t even done growing them yet. None of us are done growing anything yet. We’re still children. We are still developing. We don’t know who we are or what we’re going to be and that IS THE WHOLE POINT OF A CHILDHOOD. Growing. Developing. Figuring out who we are.”

After a beat or two of loaded silence the girl with the expensive shoes said nonchalantly, “Who pissed in your cornflakes?”

“No one pissed in my cornflakes,” I shook my head. “I should be asking who pissed in your cornflakes because you are the one who is constantly being mean and degrading everyone.”

She flipped her hair. “You always use such big words.”

“What was a big word? Degrading? Degrading is not a big word. Degrading is a little word. Or maybe it’s a medium sized word.”

As I paused to consider this, a faint chuckle of relief rippled around the table in hopes of defusing the situation and moving on to a different topic. The girl with the most expensive shoes said something about how I was such a nerd and the subject was changed and the cruel orbit of insecurity continued to spin.

But I didn’t. The next day, I ate my lunch in the yearbook room, and also the day after that and every other day for the rest of my junior year. I ate and I surfed the Internet and I wrote dreadful teenage poetry in my blog—alone. I scored well on my SAT’s and I signed myself up for college and, with a few pulled strings, I got accepted to a university a year early and didn’t have to spend my senior year in high school. I didn’t have to go back there. I didn’t have to eat lunch in that strange galaxy of a lunchroom ever again. Not ever ever again. And I never did.

Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty I’m free at last.

Things were very good for a minute and then things were very bad again: College was a kind of sanctuary. It had its own cruel orbits of insecurity, but I stayed far away from them. Far far away. I made my own orbits of real genuine friends who never pointed at people and said cruel things. If you were the kind of person who pointed and laughed at people, I promptly told you to GET OUT OF MY UNIVERSE. Get out right now.

And then I graduated.

And I went back home because I didn’t know where else to go.

Mistake. Stupid mistake.

“Just be yourself,” I had advised myself on the first day of my first job after college, feeling like I had finally mastered that elusive concept of ‘myself’. Oddly enough, this first real job was in a tall building, also brick, also brown, just like high school and not too far down the road from high school.

And I was myself. And I liked myself. But still there’d been no one to eat lunch with. I had to do a double take on most everyone I met because it seemed, if I was not mistaken, that they looked just like the insecure and cruel people from my youth. The girl with the most expensive shoes was everywhere. In fifty year old businessmen. In thirty year old secretaries. Then of course there was the actual girl with the most expensive shoes. She still lived in town. I saw her occasionally at the mall or at Ruby Tuesday’s, but she only glared and we never spoke.

How disappointing. The mean people had just graduated on up to adulthood. Never growing kinder. Never being tempered by much maturity. They still pointed and they still laughed and they still belittled others in a desperate attempt to boost their anemic egos. And now as a career woman, I was working with them. Lots of them. And just like high school, I had to eat lunch with them or else eat lunch alone.

No. no. no.

On the Friday after my first week at my first job, I came home and hung my head over the toilet and I vomited. I think my body wanted to do what my life couldn’t at that point: purge.

To make a long sad boring story very short: I persevered and I found the good in the situation and I also slowly died inside and I plotted and I prayed and one fine day years later—I escaped.

And now it was behind me.

As we (the twenty-four year old version of myself and the twenty-five year old version of my husband) passed the county line of my known life, I requested that we pull the car over. Our SUV bumped and jostled our dogs and belongings as we veered off the pavement and rumbled along the shoulder of the road.

“Do you need a moment to say goodbye?” husband asked as we rolled to a stop and I slid out of the passenger seat.

“Nuh uh,” I yelled back over my shoulder as I walked toward a tall and weathered metal sign that demarcated the bounds of the town I’d grown up in. “I said goodbye to this place a long time ago.”

A humid wind blew thick and hot against my skin as I took my moment with the county line. (Think John Wayne staring down the bad guy in an old Western. ‘Go ahead county line, make my day’.) I considered either (or perhaps simultaneously) throwing a rock at it, kicking it and/or spitting on it, but in the end I did none of those things. Instead, I gave it one long hard look and then climbed back in the SUV. Once there, I took my shoes off and hung them out the window where I gave them a violent shaking.

“What are you doing?” husband asked.

“I’m shaking the dust of this town off my feet,” I said. “Literally.”

The leather on the shoes squeaked as I flailed them.

Maybe the rest of the world contained people who were just as cruel and just as petty. It probably did, but how would I ever know if I didn’t go see it? More importantly, how could I ever put all of the disappointment I’d found in this town behind me and into the past if I was still living inside of it in the present. That was the dichotomy of my world. But no longer.

I beat my shoes and when I was finished, I slipped them one by one back on my feet and rolled the window up. Then I looked ahead.

The farm where I’d spent my childhood—with its endless cycle of life and death, crops growing up and crops withering, animals born and animals dead and decaying—was behind me. That little town—with its little school and its little people and the little boxes they’d demanded each and every person fit their self inside—was behind me. That awful brick building that housed that awful job—was behind me. All of it, good and bad, was behind me.

A few jewels were left in the wasteland. A half-dozen true friends. A half-dozen good memories. But in the end, that expanse of dirt was my Sodom and my Gomorrah. There weren’t enough righteous left in it. If I didn’t leave I was going to be consumed with it. Every day I was burning it to the ground in my heart and so I just had to go, before I became a pillar of salt.

“Are you ready?” asked husband.

Deadpanning, I said nothing because “yes” wasn’t enough. Ahead down the road, I looked to towns where ‘vegetarian’ wasn’t a strange concept. Towns where I could use words like ‘superfluous’ and ‘ostentatious’ and not have people look at me like I was superfluous and ostentatious. Towns where I could pick the people who knew my name and withhold myself from those not worth knowing. Towns that were my own, not because I grew up in them, but because I chose them.

“You’re right,” husband said to my silence. “Let’s get you out of here.”

And so we drove up interstate 85, across Lake Hartwell out of Georgia and into South Carolina and we just kept going. When the peach-emblemed Welcome to Georgia sign faded in the rearview, I stuck my head out the window and I didn’t just cheer, I screamed until my voice cracked and died and I felt something tight in my chest finally unknot itself and fall away like so many insignificant pieces of string, out the window, propelled away in the wind of our car. Gone.

Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty; I’m free at last.

Harlequin Jesus and Other Heresies at Ladies Bible Study

I wasn’t trying to offend her. Seriously, I didn’t realize how attached she was to Harlequin Jesus. Let me explain.

I’m seated in a circle of plastic chairs with four other women at a Ladies Bible study at my church. I am trying my hardest not to judge the leadership here, because it’s not my job to correct their mistakes. That’s God’s job and the job of the men and women he has set up as successive levels of authority over this ministry. “It isn’t my job,” I say over and over in my head. “It isn’t my job.”

But if I’m being perfectly honest, that video they just showed of White Jesus really tested my patience.

This isn’t my first run in with White Jesus. The image of White Jesus is everywhere. It first showed up about five hundred years after the death of the actual real Jesus and somehow became canonized in religious art. White Jesus has a narrow face marked by soft features and a long thin nose. White Jesus’ hair is a silky mane, golden-highlighted and flowing. If his hands are pictured they are usually delicate, feminine, soft and gently holding a Bible. White Jesus looks a lot like the drawings of men in half-opened shirts on the covers of Harlequin romance novels at Walgreen’s—on sale for $3.99.

That’s why I sometimes refer to White Jesus as Harlequin Jesus.

At ladies Bible study, we’ve just watched a video that showed a succession of Harlequin Jesus images. It was backed by an audio excerpt from Dr. SM Lockridge’s famous 1970’s  “That’s My King” sermon. The words of Lockridge were familiar and beautiful to me, but the images of Harlequin Jesus were familiar and disturbing to me.

Said Lockridge, “His office is manifold. His promise is sure. His light is matchless. His goodness is limitless. His mercy is everlasting. His love never changes. His Word is enough. His grace is sufficient. His reign is righteous. His yoke is easy and His burden is light.

Well. I wish I could describe Him to you, but He’s indescribable.”

And yet, visually on the church’s projection screen, there played an endless loop of images that were supposedly describing Him. And they were all so very off the mark.

I don’t know what Jesus looked like. Thankfully, any description of his physical appearance has been lost in the course of history. Seeing as how we humans have a way of lifting up physical objects and relentlessly worshipping them, I think it’s a good thing that God allowed all physical description of Jesus to be lost. If we had a drawing, or even a written description that we could recreate, we would canonize it and erroneously worship it. I know for certain this would happen with an actual picture of Jesus because that’s exactly what we’ve done with circa 500 A.D. Harlequin Jesus. Just look around any church. Harlequin Jesus is everywhere.

So–back to me sitting in a circle of plastic chairs at Ladies Bible Study. I’m already a little touchy about that video we just watched, but I know I have to get over myself. It isn’t my job to correct them. My job is to curl myself into a bowed position in the spare bedroom that I pray in, pressing my forehead down into the carpet and breathing in the smell of the synthetic fibers, and there I can ask God to correct them if it’s His will…but apart from that…this isn’t my battle. I can pray about it, but apart from that I have to leave it alone.

Which is why I shouldn’t have said what I said.

Open mouth. Insert foot.

The foreman for our small group of women is reading through a list of five questions designed to get us talking. Question number three is: What is one thing you would like to know about God? (Be specific)

Seriously, who thought that was a suitable quick get-to-know-you discussion question for a Ladies Bible study? Just think about it for a moment. What kind of genuine answers could be evoked from that question? All the ladies here (most likely) are already saved and introduced to at least the basics of the Christian faith, so we aren’t asking the easy questions at this point in our lives. We’ve moved onto the harder things.

I imagine a likely answer:

“God hasn’t healed my husband who is in stage four cancer. I know that God is able to heal him, but He just hasn’t chosen to do it. I wish I knew why it wasn’t God’s will to heal my husband.”

There is no truly acceptable human answer for that question (and many others), by the way. All we can do is resolve ourselves not to fully know. Of course, that doesn’t stop some people from trying to explain everything away anyway—which is a very stupid idea if you ask me. If I could intellectually grasp every single one of God’s wills and concepts, that would make me His intellectual equal. That would make him a puny little god that wasn’t any stronger than me. I’m cool with not knowing everything about how God operates, partially because the things I do understand and that He has chosen to let us in on are so overwhelmingly impressive to me. But that’s another blog entry for another day…

So the foreman-lady asks question number 3: What is one thing you would like to know about God? (Be specific)

A sweet older lady to my right says she would like to know what God Himself looks like and then adds, “Since I already know what Jesus looks like. You know, like those pictures in that video we just watched.”

I couldn’t help myself. My mouth was opening before I could stop it.

“Jesus wasn’t European!” it bursts out of me. “Jesus lived off the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, most likely had dark olive skin AND He was Jewish!”

To my great relief, a few other women agree with me. If I had stopped myself there, all would have probably ended well, but of course I didn’t. I had to keep going like a train heading over a cliff.

“He probably had a big crooked honking Jewish nose.”

Side note: Truly, there’s a good chance that Jesus may have been downright ugly. The only reference to His physical appearance we have is where Isaiah prophesied about Him long before He was even born. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.

He had no beauty. He certainly didn’t look like Harlequin Jesus. I don’t say all of this to the sweet old lady…but I do make that comment about the big honking Jewish nose.

This is a big honking mistake.

She rushes in to defend her Harlequin Jesus. She goes on and on about how he must have been tall and something about his face must have drawn people to Him. “He must have radiated charisma!” she says with conviction. “And he probably had big muscles from carrying all that wood around since he was a carpenter.”

I sigh. Where exactly is she getting this information? Oh that’s right…from every bad pictorial expression of Jesus that ever graced the world of art. From fifteen hundred years of the church allowing that kind of heresy to be perpetuated.

But again, it’s not my job to teach her that. I’m not the leader here.

When it’s my turn to share what I would like to know about God, I state that I am mystified by the Trinity. I would love to know just exactly how God being three and God simultaneously being one works. But oh well…that’s one of those things I’ll have to wait until I’m dead to know about…and even then I’m not sure God is going to fully reveal it to us.

I don’t state the following out loud, but I’ve read and studied and re-read and re-studied the subject. I’ve learned a tremendous amount of shocking philosophical things about how God likely operates in the process, but in the end, you still can’t stick the trinity in a box. The only logical conclusion is that the trinity is a mystery. It’s just a big fat mystery.

The trinity being the penultimate mystery of Christianity, however, doesn’t deter the older ladies in the group from trying to explain it to me. I’m bombarded with the fire/water/ice theory, the husband/father/son theory and a collection of other theories–all of which have already been carefully examined and proven as heresy by leaders in the Christian faith who are far more intelligent than I am.

I carefully try to say this kindly.

“That view of the Trinity is actually called ‘modalism’. It has been around for a very long time, but it was…ahem…declared a heresy around year 400ish A.D. — The extension of the modalist view actually turns God into a whimsical narcissist and…” At this statement, everyone deadpans and their eyes grow ten-times as wide. The expressions on their faces say, “Did she just call God a narcissist?!”

“No, no. God is NOT a narcissist. But a Modalistic view of the trinity logically turns God into a narcissist. You see, if you simply view the trinity as one person acting in three different capacities, that falls apart when you introduce…”

Empty glassy stares.

“Oh nevermind.”

I should have just agreed that Jesus looks like Fabio. And instead of the trinity, I could have said I wondered what God smells like. Maybe that would have been acceptable.

Driving home from Ladies Bible study, I call my younger brother who in many terrifying ways is the male version of myself. I know he will understand how disappointed I am and he does. He has a solid piece of advice for me, too.

“You’ve got to look at it this way, Heather,” he says. “Separate but equal.”

“Seriously?” I ask. “Segregation?”

“Hear me out,” he replies. “For whatever reason, those old ladies have lived their whole lives thinking the trinity isn’t really that big of a deal. For many years, when they’ve visualized Jesus, they’ve seen him as a white dude. You know what? That’s just how it is. They will probably go to their graves believing some wrong things, but they are still people who are saved by Grace. The real danger isn’t that they believe unfortunate and unBiblical things about God.  The danger is that you would start thinking you’re better than they are because you know better. The danger is pride. You aren’t better. They aren’t worse. You are separate in your knowledge (and yes, your knowledge is probably more correct than their’s), but you are equal in your salvation and in the eyes of God.”

I one-hundred percent agree with my baby brother. (Ok, he’s not a baby. He’s 25. But he will always be my “baby” brother.)

God didn’t make a world of women who are just like me, thankfully. That would be a scary world indeed, where everyone was sharp and skeptical. We need softer simpler ladies just as much as we need sharp and complex ladies. We are separate, the softer simpler ladies and me. But we are also equal.

So I’ll stop being angry at the old lady who defended Harlequin Jesus. In the end, that’s the only way she’s ever seen Jesus in her mind…and she loves Him. She understands her sin and redemption, and she’s absolutely in love with her Redeemer.

And that’s the only thing that matters in the end.

The best theology that we have on earth can only partially and inadequately describe the truth about God. I’m sure I’ll be surprised to learn how wrong I was myself, when I finally meet Him face-to-face.

Here’s what I know:

Jesus lived. He died (for even me). He conquered sin and death and He lives again. And I love Him.

And that’s the only thing.

Alzheimer’s and Strong Women

About a month ago, I spoke with my grandmother on the phone. We compared the weather in Las Vegas, Nevada and Gainesville, Georgia. She asked about my dogs. I asked about her needlepoint and crocheting. I marveled (for the millionth time) at how much I recognized the familiar voice of my mother in the way she said words like “well” and “now” and also how she back-ended every negative comment with a positive.

I casually mentioned that I might be visiting my hometown of Georgia over a certain span of dates. At that, a very serious tone crept into her voice and she said flatly and matter-of-factly, “Let me get a pen.” Then I listened to her footsteps as they moved into her galley kitchen (with the electric range that has cooked a thousand grilled cheeses for me) and opened the doors of her cupboard (that has always housed a dozen-or-so church-published fundraiser cookbooks.) She found the sought-after pen and asked me again what week I might be visiting. I reconfirmed but appended a firm maybe on the dates.

“It’s still up in the air,” I said. “I probably won’t know for certain until a week or so before.”

I could hear her scribbling. She reconfirmed the dates again and she reconfirmed the word, “Maybe.”

“Yes,” I said. “Maybe.”

She breathed the letters as she wrote them on her calendar, a big two-foot by three-foot monthly planner that has always hung on the wall adjacent to her oven. “M. A. Y. B. E.,” she mumbled as she wrote them next to what I imagined was a drawn straight line and the accompanying text that indicated my possible visit.

“Yes,” I said again. “Maybe. I’ll probably know if I’m coming about a week before.”

I could hear her scribbling again. She was writing on the week before the dates of my possible visit. She was spelling out something like, “Heather will maybe know if she’s visiting by this date.”

“Ok!” she proclaimed when all the writing on the calendar was done. “I’ve got it on my calendar. I won’t forget,” she reassured me. At those words, I won’t forget, I felt something go weak and wounded inside of me.

“Ok, Memaw. I love you so much. I’ll talk to you later,” and we ended our phone call.

My memaw, Carolyn, she’s in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. As of now, the thief of a disease has only robbed her short-term memory–little things like whether or not she went to the grocery store this morning or whether or not she was supposed to pick up my younger cousin from school. To combat the inevitable, she wields a calendar and a pen like weapons, fighting the war that’s raging in her head. She lashes back with written words, reminding herself of the things she can no longer trust to herself. I can’t begin to tell you how much that simple act of strength and defiance and planned combattance moves me. My Memaw is a fighter. She passed that on to her daughter, who passed that on to me.

The intruder in her mind will get better and craftier at taking things. It’s sticking its fingers into cracks and crevices that it couldn’t reach before. It will keep on taking and taking until there isn’t anything left. When she’s forgotten every person and every event that happened in her life, that murderous criminal will make her heart forget how to beat and her lungs forget how to breathe. It’s the worst kind of thief. The worst kind.

Just yesterday I got a phone call from her. There was something suspicious and jumpy about the way she said “Well hello!” and then rushed on with a few minutes worth of nervous chatter. Finally, after what I could tell was a miserable eternity to her, she found the courage to ask what she called about.

Before I tell you the question she actually asked, let me tell you the question she meant to ask.

If she were less scared of showing her mistakes, if she weren’t so scared of having her loved-ones acknowledge what we already know, she would have said: I wrote down a few scribbles on my calendar, but I can’t remember exactly what they mean. I’ve written dates that you are visiting, but then I have the word maybe. And then above that, I’ve got another date marked that says maybe. Why did I write maybe twice? I’m trying so hard to make sense of it. Is there something I’m supposed to know by this date, but I don’t? Was I supposed to call you? Were you supposed to call me? Are you spending this whole week at my house, or are you just stopping by for a day? Can you please help me figure this out?

But instead she just takes a deep breath, clears her throat, and says in a way that is obviously meant to sound very casual but instead sounds stiff and even arrogant (which she isn’t), “I was just wondering if you knew whether or not you would be visiting on,” (she pauses to look at the calendar and then thinks better of what she’s saying and starts over.) “Just wondering if you were still planning to visit sometime soon. I know we talked about it…”

She’s completely forgotten the phone call we had a month ago. She’s only got those scribbles on her calendar.

I rush in to save her dignity. I recount what we spoke about: all the details of the visit, why I was going to be in town, why I’d been uncertain about the trip, how long I had intended to stay with her. And then I tell her that the trip is off. I won’t be coming in town at all. I’ve had to postpone until the end of the summer.

She sounds incredibly disappointed as she tells me through a genuine smile how that is absolutely ok and she will see me whenever it works out and she knew it was a maybe anyway.

“Because I had wrote down maybe,” she says.

When we hang up the phone, I sit deflated on my couch and allow myself five minutes of staring at nothing and unsuccessfully fighting tears.

I don’t want Carolyn to forget me.

I know how Alzheimer’s works. She’s eventually going to forget that I’ve grown up. I’ll walk into her home in Georgia and someone will say, “Heather is here” and she will turn the corner and see a tall woman in her thirties who only sort of resembles the gangly grinning little girl in her memory. I’ll have children of my own, her great-grandchildren, but we’ll have to reintroduce them every time they meet. This will probably annoy my theoretical children. They will have never met the Carolyn that I knew, and as such, they will never have the opportunity to love her the same way. They will only know a dying old woman.

But I’ll remember who she really was.

When she was nineteen, she was a strong woman. After her first husband began beating her senseless, she packed her bags, moved out and got a menial paying job to support herself. She walked alone into a county court house, past the judging eyes of a half dozen gossiping church ladies, and did something that must have broken her tender heart. She filed for divorce.

In her late forties, she was a strong woman. Her gynecologist returned to the exam room and said he had some bad news. She wasn’t going through menopause. She was instead pregnant. Would she like to go ahead and have the abortion today? He’d never seen a woman of her age have a healthy baby. They were always “slow.” She kindly said, “No, thank you.” He objected, and she shook her head. “Sir, I wasn’t planning on having a baby at this age, but I don’t want an abortion. If this baby is ‘slow’, then I’ll be the proud fifty-year-old mother of a slow baby.”

In her late seventies, when Alzheimer’s picked a fight with her, she was a strong woman. She battled back with a pen and a calendar. And in so many other bits of life in between, she’s been a strong woman. I’ll remember that.

I’ll remember.

Even when she doesn’t.

Times Square, Shaky Moral Ground and Peace On Earth

I’m standing in Times Square, staring up at the news ticker that announces in tall scrolling red letters: Osama bin Laden is dead. For a few moments those are the only words that run across the screen, over and over and over. Osama bin Laden is dead. Osama bin Laden is dead. Osama bin Laden is dead. Eventually, whoever writes the ticker lines will add in more details, but for now this is all there is to know and it’s enough.

A crowd begins to form; at first it consists of people like James and myself. We didn’t come here intentionally. We simply emerged, bleary eyed, from a movie theater and continued on our way until we were stopped in our tracks by this little strip of news. Other people continue to stop around us. Phones come out of pockets. Clipped conversations filter around. “Hey man. Have you heard?” Soon enough, a hundred people are standing alongside us, then two hundred, then three. Some come running towards the crowd, hunt around for a moment and then frantically embrace whoever they are searching for. The look on their faces is an odd mix of jubilation and renewed grief.

Distantly an ambulance siren sounds and, as the intensity grows louder, I realize it’s heading our way. We, a few hundred people staring upward and milling around the square, are the emergency. Or rather, the potential for some enraged and opportunistic terrorist to blow us all up is the emergency. Quickly but somberly, police officers fill in the perimeter of the square. They are watchful and quiet and I find myself studying their faces–in particular, the one of a uniformed man about my age who stands near the crosswalk. He has beautiful blue eyes and I notice that every so often they brim with tears and his jaw clenches until whatever emotion he is feeling passes. To myself, I wonder who he lost. A wife? A father? A friend?

I didn’t lose anyone that I loved on September 11, 2001. I was lucky enough to lose only my naivety and my innocence. As I covertly watch the face of this police officer, I am certain that while my loss was significant enough, it pales to nothingness in comparison to what was ripped out of his life and the lives of the New Yorkers around me. How many of them are grieving the loss of their daughter or son? How many are remembering the workday their husband or wife never returned home? How many have a hole in their life that will never be mended?

On my right, a group of six friends are popping the tabs on cans of Coors Light. (I’m sure consuming alcohol in a public square is illegal, but all of the police graciously look the other way.) “Ok then,” says one of them, lifting the can. “To New York. To justice. To the closure I think I’ll never have. To what we lost and where we go from here.” Someone else says, “Here, here,” and that echoes around for a minute. The group toasts and then they cheer and then I start cheering and soon enough we’re all cheering. When the square quietens again, a deep male baritone breaks out with “Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,” and we all join in the national anthem, finishing up with an elongated “home of the braaaaaaaaaave.” Riotous applause ensues. By this time the news cameras have arrived and some entrepreneurial man of Chinese descent is circulating among us selling American flags for $5 each.

Coincidentally, not even twenty-four hours earlier, James and I were standing in the financial district, staring at the piece of ground where this all started. It’s now a construction site, but there nearly ten years ago, a grotesque number of men, women and children were either burned alive, suffocated by smoke, crushed under concrete and debris or perhaps made the decision to jump to their deaths instead. Ground Zero, we call it now. I remember watching the images of bodies tumbling out of the tower live on the news. “They’re falling,” I thought at first, but then the realization sank in that no, they weren’t falling–they were jumping. Whatever hell was inside that building was worse than jumping sixty stories to your death.

A teddy bear lay propped against the fence in front of us. Between its paws was a plush pink heart that read, “I love you mommy.” A tiny bouquet of baby’s breath was tucked under the arm. I wondered, did that child’s mother hit the pavement where we now stood? Perhaps.

Under my own breath, I muttered an obscenity reserved only for those who truly deserve it.

“What do you feel right now?” I asked my husband as we stared up at the cranes and the scaffolding and the safety lights. He answered me and then we stood in silence. It was late, well past midnight, and the streets were mostly empty. As we gazed upward, a gray haired man in suit and tie happened past and paused with us. We three strangers stood in silence for a moment, and then he ambled on his way.

James put his arm around me and nodded as if in response to something I’d just said, although I hadn’t. “We’re going to get them,” he said soberly.

“I know,” I said. “I hope it’s soon.”

Now we stand in Times Square, with the news ticker spitting out the details of the event we hoped for just a few hours earlier. What a perfect paradox.

The crowd around us moves on to other songs. Not everyone knows the lyrics for “God Bless America” but a few people do their best while the rest “la la la” along. Some guy has the genius idea to belt out “We Are The Champions” and that really gets the crowd excited.

“Are we the champions?” I ask my more-politically-savvy husband.

He thinks for a moment then says, “Not entirely yet. Now we just have to hope they’re angry enough to get sloppy and reveal their weak points. Then we start taking them out slowly, one by one. We’re not quite the champions, but we’re closer to being the champions than we were before.”

The crowd has mostly all locked arms and we are swaying in time to the beat. “And we’ll keep on fighting to the end…” we sing together. “We are the champions. No time for losers ‘cause we are the champions…”

I dig my phone out of my purse and read the posts filtering through facebook. Most people thank God. Some take the tack that I myself was originally going to take–a simple “Burn in hell.” (Though when it comes down to it, I can’t post it. I want to say it, but then I lose heart. (I’m going to Christian-land here…naysayers give me three sentences.) I can’t wish the wrath of God on anyone because I know I’m guilty of it myself. The only thing I can wish on Bin Laden is the saving grace of Christ, which I’m certain he missed. The fact that it’s too late for one more person sobers me.)

As I scroll through, I see that not everyone is pleased with the news. A handful of people are outraged that we didn’t offer the man (monster) a trial. I get that concept, and trust me, I’m quite a big fan of concepts. I realize judgment before trial is a dangerous ethical line to toe. But for the most evil genocidal murderer since Adolf Hitler, I’m willing to step out on shaky moral ground and let the man die without a trial. If I were to have killed that many innocent people and my guilt was that blatantly obvious, I’d hope you would gun me down without a trial and with no questions asked as well.

I wonder quietly, as I read the angrier posts, if the people writing them would have the courage to speak them to the grieving police officer near my side or to the child who only yesterday placed a teddy bear in-memoriam where her mother brutally and needlessly died.

Osama bin Laden, as the head of network of murderers, deserved to be executed. If you don’t feel this way, I worry that you’ve become too lost in concept (political or otherwise) to see the reality around you. If nothing else, we human beings have a right to protect our own lives and ensure an event like 9/11 never happens again. Bin Laden’s death was a very necessary part of achieving that end.

You can argue your differing viewpoint, but I hope you’ll be fair enough to realize your adversary isn’t such a vague a concept as a political institution. Instead, it’s a ten-year-old child who never knew her mother. It’s a wife who received a video of her journalist husband being slowly beheaded by al Qaeda with a dull knife (Daniel Pearl, 2002).

I find it interesting that no one is outraged when a man who kidnapped, raped and cannibalized multiple children is put to death by lethal injection, and yet so many are upset by the justice delivered to bin Laden. Have we forgotten what this man is responsible for? Jeffrey Dahmer was only responsible for the death of seventeen. Bin Laden was responsible for the death of, at the very least, 3000.

3000. Is it so big a number that we’ve simply made it a statistic and forgotten that those were real live suffering murdered human beings?

3000 murders.

Those weren’t 3000 political sentiments. They were moms and brothers and best friends and they didn’t die easily.

Back to Times Square. I’m pretty sure any nay-saying sentiment wouldn’t be tolerated here tonight. We sing, we cheer, and those who have a reason cry as they remember their grief. I mostly just set my jaw in a firm line and think about what all this means. History has been made again tonight. It feels like the world just shifted a little more off kilter. We’re moving in a different direction now. I want this to be a good thing. I hope against hope that this produces what we need it to: Safety. Security. Peace.

Peace.

I know deep down that we won’t ever achieve that much sought state here on earth.

But we can try.

We can absolutely try.

I intermittently hum the melodies to several different so-patriotic-they’re-cliché songs as we walk back to our hotel later that night. “God bless America, land that I love…”–“And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air gave proof through the night that our flag was still there…”–And then, randomly–“We are the champions my friend, and we’ll keep on fighting ‘til the end…”

And we’ll keep on fighting until the end.

For Posterity

When I was in the eighth grade, seated in front of my parents’ enormous (by today’s standard) Macintosh desktop computer, (and let me take a moment here to say nice job on picking a Mac in a DOS world, mom. You were ahead of your time.) I stumbled across a website called the OpenDiary.com, signed up for an account, and tentatively typed out my first entry. This was long before the rise of the blog. Blog wasn’t even a word in the mid-nineties. (And now I officially feel old. Back in my day, kids, the word blog was an insult.)

There was no sharing of the fact that I was journaling online. My one solitary friend owned a computer, but her parents didn’t want to pay for such an unnecessary frill as, they called it, the Internets. And obviously this was long before such news could be broadcast on Facebook or Twitter. (Social networking? What’s that?)

So, mostly late at night after everyone else in the house had gone to sleep, I pecked out to no one in particular what would ten years later become known as blog entries. I was a tween. My first reaction is to cringe at the thought of what was included in those entries. I’ve seen enough poorly written blogs from twelve year old girls to know that I probably bored some people to tears with mundane details of how much I loved VH-1 pop-up-videos and how I dreamed of one day marrying Justin Timberlake.

But then there was also the deeper stuff. Dealing with a chronic childhood illness. Feeling like a square-peg shoved into a painfully round hole at school. How unusually cruel young girls can be in a small town where gossip is the most popular form of entertainment. All my dreams to run run run as fast as I could away from where I was to…to anywhere really. Just get me out of there…

And before I knew it, my little blog entries had a following. A 27-year-old mother in Vermont. A 19-year-old girl from New York. A 57-year-old man in Delaware (I know, my first thought is pedophile too. But I really don’t think he was.) And it grew from there. When I finally lost interest in my blog sometime during my freshman year of college, I had over 300 people who regularly read my entries.  That 27-year-old mother had become someone I considered a friend. And the blog…well…in many ways it had saved me. It had been a dear and enduring friend through some of my more difficult developmental moments.

I had a hideous roommate my freshman year of college. She was “Jewish” (by birth only. This girl had no respect for Yahweh.) and her favorite curse phrase was “Jesus F-ing Christ.” I can’t tell you how many times my skin would crawl when she would get on the phone to whatever long-suffering friend would listen to her constant string of profanity, and let loose.

She had a “serious” boyfriend (with “serious” in quotes because when she wasn’t in bed with him, she was in bed with whatever she happened to luck up and bring home that night.) He weighed about fifty pounds less than she did, undertook her in the height department by a good nine inches, and wore really baggy jeans that showed the band plus 6 inches of his boxer shorts. He went to college in another town and would spend the occasional weekend in our dorm.

During those visits (and the nights with the happen-chance strangers,) I did anything I could to stay away from our tiny 9 by 8 foot room that we shared. Anything to avoid the unmistakable smell of marijuana and sex that followed her everywhere. (This was around the time Proctor & Gamble introduced Febreze. I would drench her bed in it while she was out at class.) My cousin who out-aged me by two years lived in a neighboring dorm and I’d often try non-chalantly paying her a visit to avoid returning to my own quarters. This drove her nuts, obviously. I could feel the resentment for encroaching on her space, could feel the resentment from my roommate-from-hades for encroaching on her space, could feel the concerned looks from my parents when I came home every single weekend and avoided conversation about how I was holding up at college.

The blog fell by the wayside. What could I write? I hate my life? That gets mundane after an entry or two. And it was all I could say. I hate my life. I hate my life. I really hate my life. And I’ve gained fifteen pounds and I don’t fit into any of my jeans. I was sick of the details I had to share. I didn’t want to relive them in print. I stopped writing.

My last entry was after a particularly hideous blind date that the aforementioned cousin set up. Bless her soul…she was just trying to help. He was ten years older than me and, I cringe to remember it, balding. There is nothing wrong with a balding man, but when you are 18 and in college, there is everything wrong with a balding man.

I let him pay for dinner. I let him drop me off at a friend’s apartment (because there was no way I was admitting to a 28 year old I lived the dorms.) And then, you know, there was that awkward moment where we could have at least peck-kissed or hugged each other if we were feeling a connection. But obviously we weren’t. He was 28 and balding. I was 18 and bulging out of my ill-fitting jeans. He was a tax-attorney. I was a tortured teenager with no clue what I wanted to major in.

We shook hands. We SHOOK HANDS. I’m in tears now I’m laughing so hard at that scene. I acted like I was heading back to “my” apartment, then detoured to my car and drove back to my dorm. It was 1 am on a Friday and surprisingly my roommate was asleep in her bed. She grumbled some profanity as I logged on my computer and began to click the keys and record the details of my night. “Jesus F-ing Christ,” she said. “Turn that d*mn thing off.”

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was the end. I couldn’t keep writing. I was withdrawing. Oh, if I could go back and speak to the younger version of myself. I would tell her to stand up to the roommate.

“Tell her that name is sacred to you,” I’d say. “Tell her she should look into the God she is cursing. He doesn’t deserve that disrespect. Tell her she can’t keep bringing delinquent looking men into your dorm room. Tell her 50% of this room is yours, so stop acting like she owns it all.”

Oh…the things I would tell me. But the college years, like everything else in life, are something you only get one shot at. So I persevered quietly.  And I stopped the blog entries. And the OpenDiary account fell silent.

“Are you still there?” the then 33-year-old mom from Vermont asked. “When are you going to post again? Did the tax attorney ever call you?”

But I was done.

I transferred to another college. It was meant at first to be only for a summer semester, but it turned into the rest of my college career. I met this boy. This short (ok, he’s my height, but “short” by my then dating standards) boy. He was quiet. Prone to the scientific the way I was prone to the artistic. I didn’t like him “that” way at first. I remember scanning the room of my summer semester chemistry class, looking for potential dating candidates, finding none, but noting that the short one with the blue eyes wasn’t too bad.

And you know, the day wore on and it turned out he was my chemistry lab partner. Then I saw him later at the gym and accidentally invited myself over to his house (it’s a long story.) Then I was leaving his parent’s house after lunch one day two months later (again, long story…I’ll write it much later in life, when all the incriminated parties are dead.) And he looked at me and grinned and waved goodbye and I thought, “Do I…do I like him?” But then thought, “No…no way. He’s much too short.”

But like it or not, something had changed at that point. I couldn’t get the short guy out of my head. Suddenly every sappy country music song I heard reminded me of him. I found myself staring at the back of his head in chemistry class, thinking, if I could just touch that jaw of his, just put the tips of my fingers on that square jaw and…

But that was ridiculous, because I was moving back home in a few weeks. The summer semester was over. It was time to say goodbye.

Which is why, at 3:30am on a Tuesday, when I’d been listening to sappy country music songs and couldn’t sleep, I crept out of my (blessedly single-occupancy) dorm room, got in my car and drove the two blocks to his little rented house near the college. I figured I’d hide in my car and stare at his front door, then get sleepy and go back home

But no. I couldn’t sit in the car. I had to get out. I had to walk up to the front porch, had to rest my head on his front door like some insane celebrity stalker and wish with all my heart that he would magically walk out onto the porch, take me in his arms and say, “Heather Wiley, I’m in love with you. Be my wife.”

After that obviously restraining-order deserving fantasy scene, I crept off the porch into my car and calculated how much noise starting the engine would make and how quickly I could get out of there. But as I was just garnering the courage to start the engine and peel out of there, I happened to look to my right and, oh no…this can’t be happening…there he was. His eyes were sleepy and it was obvious from the way his t-shirt was too high on his waist that he had just pulled on his clothes. I had woken him up. Oh crap. He had heard me on his porch.

What does a girl do in a moment such as this?

The obvious answer is, RUN! FAST! RUN NOW!

And so I started that engine and drove that 1998 Camry out of there like I’d stolen it. I rammed it into a parallel parking spot in front of my dorm and made to sprint toward the front doors, but, no…no…NO…there he was sitting in his car, blocking my path to the front doors of the dorm. Dang, he was fast. How had he made it here that quickly? He must have been right on my heels…

I contemplated my options. Option #1: Make up an excuse for being at his dorm at 3:30am. What excuse could I come up with? Ok…none.  I had nothing. Option #2: Run very fast into my dorm and avoid him for the remaining two weeks. Obviously this would be difficult seeing as he was my lab partner. Could I switch lab partners? No…this option wasn’t going to work either. Option #3: Talk to him.

Talk to him. Tell him that I obviously love him. Tell him that I can’t stop thinking about him and all I want is for him to look at me and just…just…

“Heather?” he said, craning his head to see me across the street through the passenger window of his car.

“Umm…yes?” I said, darting my eyes left and right, looking for an escape route.

“Were you just on my porch?”

“Ha…ha ha. Porch. Was I on your porch? Ha…” I needed an escape route. If I ran to the right, I could bypass his car and beeline to the side entrance. I just needed my key card. Where was my key card? I began digging in my purse, rummaging through my wallet, my compact, my five lipsticks…there it was…my key card. I pulled it out and contemplated the right moment to bolt for it.

“Heather?” he said again. That deep voice was enough to bring my head out of my escape plans.

“Umm…Yes?” I said again.

“Do you want to get in the car?” he asked.

Get in the car? There was no way I was getting in his car. What I really needed to do was get the heck out of there. Which is why I was so surprised when my feet started walking me toward the car. And then, out of nowhere, my hand went to open the door. But he was too quick for me. He had leaned across the console and opened the door for me. Well that was awfully gentlemanly like. He just opened the door for me! Surprising myself, I sank into the passenger seat and looked at him guiltily.

“Were you just on my porch?” he repeated.

“I…” I said, trying to sound dignified and resentful, as if the thought of me on his porch was preposterous, “I…”

“Heather?” he said. “Are you alright?”

“Am I all alright?” I repeated. “Am I alright? No, I am not alright!” My voice still held the same preposterous tone, but I was beginning to crumble. What could I say at this point?

“Is this because of what happened earlier?” he asked.

Ok…I hadn’t mentioned this to you yet, but something did happen earlier. We had spent the day shooting pistols at a gun range. (Yes, it’s true I love my high heels. But I also love hitting a target dead center with my .40 caliber Smith & Wesson. You can blame my gun-aficionado dad for that one.) When we parted ways at the end of the day, this short boy, my lab partner, James, leaned over to hug me. And then something happened that changed everything. He kissed my cheek. Just a quick little peck, and then he was off. He drove away. Gone. Nothing.

No discussion. No words. Just a quick little kiss.

Seriously, what was I supposed to think? No, seriously, WHAT was I supposed to think? Was that a “Hey, you’re a great friend and I like shooting guns with you,” kiss? Or was it a “Hey, you look hot shooting that gun. Maybe we should get dinner sometime” kiss?

No wonder I was awake at 3:30am, tortured, unable to sleep. This was entirely his fault.

“Yes!” I declared, still holding the key card in my hand, gesturing with it indignantly. “This is about what happened earlier!” I looked toward the same side entrance I had meant to run for earlier. Perhaps, if I just opened the door and started running, I could make it inside before he knew what happened. I could then drop out of chemistry class, move home, and no one would be the wiser. Then I would never tell a soul about the night I stalked my chemistry lab partner’s house at 3:30am. It would all be forgotten.

“Heather?” he said again, looking contrite. Seriously, WHY did he keep saying my name like that? It made me go all soft and mushy and giggly inside. I had to maintain composure here. He looked at me apologetically and said, “I’m so sorry. I should never have done that. I should have asked you if it was ok to…to kiss you. I shouldn’t have just assumed…”

“NO!” I screamed, and he looked obviously startled. “No that is not what was wrong!” I said. Still, the key card was in my hand and I was gesturing with it uncontrollably, angrily, indignantly. This was how I dealt with uncomfortable situations. I got haughty and bossy and mean. It wasn’t a problem that he had kissed me! No. Obviously not. The problem was that he had stopped kissing me. But I wasn’t going to say that. No way. I had to get out of here as fast as was humanly possible.

“Heather?” he said again, imploringly.

Ok, that was enough. “Would you stop saying my name!” I screamed, and this time when I gestured wildly with my hands, the key card went flying and landed somewhere between my seat and the console of his car. Tears sprang into my eyes. I had to get out of there. I had to go NOW. I began digging furiously beside the seat for the card. Where was the key card? Why couldn’t I get my hand on it? Where was it?!?!

“I can’t find it!” I finally cried, looking up and into his face.

And the next moment is forever etched into my memory as one of those defining events that moves your life in a direction you never expected it to go. I love those moments.

He cupped my face in his hands and he kissed me. Really kissed me. Not just a peck on the cheek. I thought, I’ll never kiss another boy, ever. (Although, I did wind up kissing two other boys. But again, that’s a whole other story for a whole other time.)

The only thing we said after that was a muffled “Goodbye” to each other. I didn’t have any words. Neither did he. I fished my key-card out from between the seats and floated off to my dorm and once inside, I sank down against the door and the only thing I could think was “Wow” and “I wish I could tell my OpenDiary readers about this.” I felt such a long way from that date with the balding tax attorney. But by this time, my blog had sat silent for two years. There was no going back to it.

Obviously, I married the short guy. We’ve had crazy adventures together since then, and moved to Las Vegas, of all places, and life has been incredibly interesting to say the least. We’ve fought like cats and dogs at times, and been more in love than I can stand at times. And all along, at the back of my mind, I haven’t been able to stop wishing I could write about it all. Even now, I’m thinking about the mom from Vermont who is well into her forties by now. I’d like to let her know that I never speak to and couldn’t care less about those petty girls from high school that she told me not to worry about, and she was right, I did flourish in the end, in my own way.

So, I don’t know. I guess I thought I’d give the blog thing another try? As you might know (or might not know,) I’m finally working (as in actually getting paid) as a writer. I’m done with the bulk of my work for a few weeks and…I don’t know…I kind of miss waking up in the morning, grabbing a cup of coffee, and hitting the keyboard. Maybe this could fill the days for a bit, while I wait for more work?

There is nothing I love-to-hate more than a self-absorbed blogger. I read some of these entries from other bloggers (especially mom bloggers) about all the mundane details of their and their toddlers existence, and I often want to pluck my eyes out for boredom. But really, who am I kidding? I’m hooked on their blogs. I’ll faithfully read them, even if they tirelessly recount their trials with potty-training until I want to cry (for myself and for them.) It’s fascinating, stepping into someone else’s world for a minute.

So…you know…maybe I’ll do that here. In this blog. Capture the hideously boring details of my life and…you know…if you want…you can read them. If you don’t…if you find me boring and mundane…then don’t subscribe. There…that is the “I’m-tough-I-don’t-care-what-you-think” statement that will give me the confidence to persevere in this.

And to get all these details down.

Maybe in honor of that Vermont mom who cared when I was 12 and awkward.

But mostly for myself.

And for posterity.