The Confession

by Robert Ladd

  ***

  That was seventeen years ago. Seventeen long and lonely years. And hardly a day passes when I don’t think about it. When I don’t think about him.

  “Rachel,” God said. “I’d like for you to call your mother.”

  “And tell her what?” I asked.

  We stopped walking. God turned to face me.

  “Tell her you love her,” he said.

  This was a much bigger deal than it sounded like. I hadn’t told my mom I loved in her in years.

  God wasn’t finished though.

  “Then ask her if you and she could talk about Steve,” he continued.

  Uh-oh, I thought. I can’t do that. I can’t ask her to talk about that. There’s just no way.

  But God wouldn’t let up.

  “Because,” he said, “if you ask her, you might be surprised at what she has to say.”

  No, that was the problem. I knew exactly what she would say. She’d say I was the one who screwed up her life; and that no matter what I said or did, it would never ever bring back her little fighter. She lost him, and got me. Which was never going to be enough.

  God stood by quietly as I beat myself up over the past. When I finally worked up the courage to look at him, his kind blue eyes were somehow kinder than before. When he spoke, his soft voice even softer.

  “Call her,” was all he said.

  Which pretty much ended the debate right there. I just couldn’t argue with someone who was being so nice.

  “OK,” I said. “I’ll call her.”

  He seemed pleased with my decision.

  It was then I realized how sad it is that we all hide behind masks. All of us. Some, like my mother, do it to conceal heartache; others, like me, do it to bury guilt. But we all do it. All the time. And the tragic thing is this: the masks we wear only serve to produce more of the things we try to conceal. When hidden, broken hearts and guilt compound exponentially.

  So why do we do it? Why do we punish ourselves?

  Maybe that guy who said we are our own worst enemy was right. Maybe the one person doing me the most harm was me.

  I glanced at God. He was smiling.

  “The doors of Hell are locked from the inside,” he said.

  I nodded with a sudden understanding.

  “Yes they are,” I replied. “Yes they are.”

  And on we walked in search of the right piece of ground.

  TWENTY

  Entry #97

  Let God be God, not what we would like him to be.

  Martin Luther

  The one thing that surprised me most about God was how easy it was to make him laugh. He had a good laugh, too. Not too loud or soft or fake-sounding. Plus he had happy eyes. I liked his eyes a lot.

  “Are you always this way?” I said. “Light-hearted, I mean.”

  He nodded. “Actually I am. It’s my default position.”

  “So what makes you happy?”

  “Oh, small things, really,” he said. “The smell of burning leaves in the fall. The sound of distant thunder. Sunsets. Rain. Children laughing.

  He looked at me and smiled.

  “You make me happy, Rachel. Just being out here with you brings me a special kind of joy.”

  I was suddenly so proud I thought I’d pop. Maybe I was wrong about that picture I drew of me as a little blade of grass. Maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t so scrawny after all.

  “But,” I said, “do you ever stop and ask yourself, what was I thinking when I created this place?”’

  He shook his head. “No, I never think that. There are some people who disappoint me, certainly, but as a whole I’m delighted with the way things have turned out. After all, I didn’t create you because I was lonely.”

  “So why did you create us?” I asked.

  Just then we crested a small hill and stopped walking. God placed both hands on his hips, and surveyed the horizon. I followed his gaze. A large body of water stretched out in front of us.

  “Is this it?” I asked.

  God nodded. “It’s beautiful, don’t you think?”

  I told him it was. We stared at the water for a few moments. Finally God turned to me.

  “It’s getting rather late,” he said. “I’m going to send you home now, but if you’re willing, I’d like for you to return to St. Michael’s first thing in the morning. I’ll meet you there.”

  I told him I was already looking forward to it, and I was.

  “Also,” he said, “I’d like for you to walk to the church, if that’s not too much trouble.”

  I told him of course I would.

  “Excellent,” he said. “Tomorrow we’ll come back to this very spot. We’re going to have fun over the next day or two.”

  God took both my hands in his.

  “Rachel,” he said, “I’ve enjoyed myself immensely this afternoon. Thank you so very much for spending the day with me.”

  Unaccustomed as I was to getting compliments from anyone, much less God, I blushed a deep shade of red. I think I actually said something like Don’t mention it, but I’m not sure.

  “Oh, and tomorrow,” God added, “I’ll answer that question of yours.”

  “What question?”

  “Why I created you,” he said. “You might be surprised at the answer.”

  God hugged me then. It was wonderful. He smelled clean, like he’d just gotten out of the shower, and was cool to the touch, not hot and sweaty like me. I hugged him gently at first with my eyes open then closed them. Gradually my arms tightened, squeezing so hard I was afraid I’d cut off his circulation. His arms pulled tighter in response.

  It reminded me of the time I was twelve years old and my dad caught me smoking a cigarette behind our house. Instead of yelling with anger, he hugged me instead. Feeling my father’s arms around me taught me all I needed to know about unconditional love. I felt so good about him and bad about me that I never smoked another cigarette again.

  Sometimes the best lessons are taught with a hug.

  A moment later, I felt a slight wind against my cheek and the sensation of rapid movement. I opened my eyes. Once again I was back in the Confessional at St. Michael’s. Alone. I paused to collect my bearings then hurried out of the church, half-afraid that some priest might tackle me before I made it outside, and force me to tell him what I’d been up to.

  But I got away clean.

  Twenty minutes later I was home.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Entry #81

  Destiny grants us our wishes, but in its own way, in order to give us something beyond our wishes.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  By the time I made it back to my apartment, it occurred to me I’d gone the entire day without eating or drinking anything, and yet I wasn’t hungry or thirsty. The only time I could remember doing that was when I was sick, and even then I had a sip of water or Sprite. I couldn’t be sure if my lack of appetite was due to neglect or a miracle. In the off-chance it wasn’t a miracle, I made myself some tomato soup then sat down in my “reading chair” to think about the events of the day.

  My reading chair is an old-fashioned recliner my mom gave Joe and me after we got married. I named it that because when I was a kid, Dad would put me in his lap just before I went to bed and read the most wonderful stories to me: Goodnight Moon, Where the Wild Things Are and The Giving Tree. Sometimes we watched old TV shows. Shows like Andy Griffith or I Love Lucy. Comedies mostly. I loved them all. Still do.

  My recliner didn’t recline all that well anymore, and the arms were thread-bare and a couple springs sometimes poked me in the rear end when I sat down, but none of that mattered – I loved it. It was our chair.

  After I sat down, the first thing that came to mind was the overwhelming fact that I’d spent the afternoon with God. I had not merely been in the presence of a godly-person, but had actually talked to, walked with and listened to the Maker of all Mankind, the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End. Me, Rachel Walker. God chose me.

&nb
sp; Suddenly a long-forgotten memory came rushing back. I was ten years old and our family traveled to Italy on vacation. Being the good Catholics that we were, we scheduled a tour of the Vatican. We were just outside St. Peter’s Square, which I discovered is actually round, when from out of nowhere here comes a guy we thought was the pope. As it turns out, he wasn’t the pope, but it must have been someone important because he was surrounded by a gaggle of other priests who seemed to hang on to his every word. He was dressed all in red, including a red cape and a little red beanie for a hat. They were all talking with serious faces and hushed tones about who knows what, when the unthinkable happened. Just as they passed us, the man in the middle glanced in my direction. I’ll never forget it. Our eyes met and locked together as if a thin, silver wire had suddenly pulled tight between us. He stopped abruptly, which forced his little band of priests to bump into each other like you see on the cartoons, except nobody laughed. Without saying a word, the main priest broke ranks and, much to my horror, walked straight as an arrow toward me. No one said a word. In fact, I think the whole place fell silent as the important man in red stopped directly in front of me, smiled and placed his hand on my head.

  “What is your name?” he asked.

  I told him, and to this day I can still hear the five words he spoke

  “Rachel, God is with you.”

  Then he rejoined his group and a moment later was gone.

  Mom was so flabbergasted she immediately had to go pee. Dad kept kicking himself for not taking any pictures, and Steve was so awed by the experience that he wouldn’t let me wash my hair for a week afterward.

  Me, on the other hand, I felt none of those things. What I felt instead was that I had been chosen. Chosen for what, I had no idea, but still I had the definite sense of being singled out for something. And since it was an important priest in an important place that did the singling-out, I felt I must be important.

  When I got back to school, our teacher asked what we had done over the summer. I told them about the priest but not about the feeling. They wouldn’t have believed it anyway. Of course, as time went on and nothing spectacular happened, I quit believing it, too. I wrote off the whole episode as a Vatican publicity stunt. Something the pope instructed his priest to do every so often, just to make the little people feel important.

  Of course today all of that had changed. I now had reason to believe I had been chosen, and that somehow the man in the red beanie knew it. I made a mental note to ask God about it when I got the chance.

  Twice that night I picked up the phone to call my mother but chickened out both times. I believed God when he told me the best thing I could do for her was listen and care. I was OK with listening. It was the caring I wasn’t sure about. Caring was risky. It’s a dangerous thing to give your heart to someone who has pulverized it so many times that you’ve lost count.

  Nevertheless, God asked me to do it. So I did it.

  I picked up the phone a third time. To my relief, after a couple rings, it went to voicemail.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said. “It’s me. No particular reason for calling. Just wanted to check in and see you how you were doing.”

  I pictured my mother standing by the phone, arms crossed, a slight frown on her face, wondering what had gotten into me.

  “Hope you’re OK,” I continued. “I love you. Call me when you get home.”

  Click.

  After I hung up, I realized I’d just done three things I hadn’t done in years. One, expressed an interest in how my mother was doing. Two, told her, unsolicited, that I loved her; and three, asked her to do the one thing that I daily dreaded she would do: call me.

  This was totally unlike me. I’m an avoider by nature. When given the option of doing or not doing something uncomfortable, I almost always avoid doing it. But I guess being around God for half a day was changing me. It was making me do things I once thought unthinkable.

  I’ve heard it said that God moves in mysterious ways. Well, the way he was moving with me was mysterious beyond belief. But believe it I did.

  Little did I know at the time how mysterious it would soon become.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Entry #111

  Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  TUESDAY

  The next morning, I awoke early, around seven a.m., showered, ate a bowl of Coco-Puffs and sat down at the kitchen table with a small notepad. I wrote down a list of questions I wanted to ask. If I was going to spend a couple days with the smartest guy in the universe, I wanted to make sure I made good use of our time.

  After two cups of coffee and six really good questions, I stuck the notepad in my back pocket and headed for St. Michael’s. The day was going to be special. I just knew it.

  I considered calling my mother before I left but opted not to. She was still probably trying to figure out why I called last night. If I called again so soon, she might panic. And the morning was starting out so well that I didn’t want to mess it up with a panicked mother.

  Twenty minutes later I walked into St. Michael’s and went straight to the Confessional. The green light was on. I went in. As I stepped through the door, I wasn’t sure if I would arrive back at the lake or if I had to go through Confession all over again. I hoped for immediate transport, but what I got was nothing. The Confessional was empty, as was the booth next to me, as far as I could tell. I checked my watch. Almost 8:30. God had said first thing in the morning, which I now guessed could have been earlier. This caused a terrible question to pop into my head. What if God had been waiting for a couple hours, got impatient and left without me? He said he didn’t get angry very often but didn’t mention anything about getting antsy. Leaving without me hardly made sense, though. I was the reason he showed up in the first place, so the last thing he would do is take off empty-handed. Finally I decided I was early, and sat down to await instructions.

  After a few minutes I started my confession.

  “Bless me, Father,” I said. “For I have sinned.”

  I said that just in case God snuck in without my realizing it. I got no response. A couple minutes later, I tried again, but got the same answer. After another ten minutes, which seemed like ten hours, I opened the door to the Confessional and peeked out. Maybe I’d passed God somehow without knowing it.

  The empty sanctuary was no longer empty. Sitting in the front pew, directly in front of the crucifix, was a young black woman, wearing a bright yellow dress and, of all things, a pair of sunglasses. She moved to the prayer rail in front of the altar and kneeled. She was tall and slender and there was something about the way that she moved that was graceful, almost cat-like. I took a seat in the back row and watched carefully.

  She bowed her head for a few moments then stood, made the sign of the cross and turned up the aisle toward me. I dropped my gaze so she wouldn’t think I was watching her. When she passed by, I heard this…

  “Good morning, Rachel. Sorry to keep you waiting.”

  I’m sure I looked as surprised as I felt. I react that way anytime someone I don’t know calls me by name, especially when it turns out I do know them, but when I did they were much older, and of the opposite sex.

  “Oh, good morning,” I said. “I didn’t recognize you.”

  God smiled a radiant smile, her teeth sparkling white against the dark skin of her face.

  “I should have prepared you for this,” she said. “I try to appear according to people’s expectations, but occasionally I like to help them stretch those expectations.”

  I told her I liked the idea of God being female, and asked if she would be someone else later in the day.

  “No,” she replied with another smile. “One person per day seems to do it.”

  “May I ask you a question before we go?” I said.

  “Of course. Anything.”

  “What were you doing just now? At the altar. It looked like you were praying.”

  “I was praying,” she sai
d.

  Which struck me as ironic, but I didn’t want my next question to sound cynical, because I wasn’t. I truly wanted to know.

  “But if you’re God, who do you pray to?”

  She sat next to me.

  “Rachel, prayer is not always about you talking to me. It’s also about me talking to you. I begin each day listening and responding. Sort of like when you check your e-mail.”

  “Does that mean you only listen once a day?”

  “No, I listen all day,” she said. “But whenever I get the chance, I like to kneel in a house of worship. It keeps me in touch with the roots of my creation.”

  “Do you do that very often?” I asked. “ Appear as a human in a church here on earth?”

  “Oh, several times a day,” God said as her smile widened. “And not always in a church. Sometimes it’s a school or the grocery store or occasionally I might just turn up at night in an empty parking lot.”

  She paused long enough for me to put the pieces together.

  “That was you?” I asked.

  She laughed. “No, that was Daniel. He’s an angel. An arch-angel actually. He’s very special.”

  I was amazed. “You sent an angel to protect me?”

  She nodded. “And to comfort you at your husband’s funeral,” she said. “And especially to speak to you after you took the pills.”

  Suddenly I was embarrassed. Ashamed actually. I’d hoped God hadn’t noticed the pills. I was wrong of course. God notices everything.

  “May I ask you another question before we go?” I ventured.

  “Of course,” she replied.

  “Why are you wearing sunglasses?”

  She didn’t answer as quickly as I thought she might, and when she did, her response was not one I anticipated. She removed her sunglasses. It was obvious that she had been crying. Then for reasons even I don’t understand, I told her I was sorry.

  “Don’t be,” she said. “Tears of sadness can sometimes be an expression of joy.” She turned and looked at the crucifix. “But looking at what they did to him always makes me sad. Sad for him that it happened, but joyful for the world that it did.”

  Both of us quietly stared at the concrete Jesus nailed to the concrete cross, and I too felt a sense of sadness. A sadness I’d never experienced before when looking at the crucifix.

  “It was horrible,” she said, tears in her eyes again. “They stripped him, beat him, kicked him, spit on him. They nailed his hands and feet to a dirty piece of wood then hung him up in public so that everyone could watch.”

  Now I was the one crying.

  “So why did you allow it to happen?” I asked.

  God looked steadfastly at her Son without speaking then slowly, quietly, she whispered these words.

  “Because they wanted to kill him.”

  There are times in life when you know the best thing to say is absolutely nothing, so that’s what I did.

  After a few minutes, God patted my hand, and asked if I was ready to go. I told her I was, and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, we were standing at the edge of the lake from yesterday. God was nearby, adjusting the legs of what looked like a small telescope, which I later discovered was a transom.

  Our work for the day had begun.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Entry #31

  Buddha, was he where it’s at/Is he were you are?

  Could Mohammed move a mountain/Or was that just PR?

  Tim Rice

  As we began our work each day, I noticed that somewhere between St. Michael’s and the field, God always changed clothes. Yesterday he started out in a jacket and slacks, but ended up in jeans and a work shirt. Today she started out in a dress and heels, but now had on a baseball cap, khakis and a white t-shirt. I guess being all things to all people means dressing like them, too.

  “Have you ever done any surveying?” God asked.

  I told her no, but that once when I was in the third grade my cousin Leonard and I buried a jar full of pennies and drew a pirate’s map leading to it.

  God laughed. “I remember that map. It was really quite good. Especially the part with the skull and cross-bones and the words ‘Here There Be Dragons.’ That was a nice touch.”

  I was surprised that God would remember something as trivial as a kid’s map, but even more surprised that she seemed to take delight in the memory itself. She sounded more like a doting parent than the Lord of the Universe.

  “The section of ground that we need,” God said, “needs be three hundred meters deep, two hundred meters wide, and incorporate the lake on one side. If you’d like, I can shoot the four corners of our plat with the transom and direct you to the spot where you can mark it with these.” She held up a handful of small white flags. “As we measure, we can talk.”

  “Is it OK if we pick up where we left off yesterday?” I asked.

  God agreed, so that’s where I began.

  “Why did you create us?”

  She unfolded the legs of the tripod.

  “I hope this doesn’t sound like a glib answer,” she said. “But I created you out of love.”

  “Because you needed something or rather someone to love?”

  She shook her head.

  “Not exactly. I don’t have the emotion of love that needs to be expressed – I am love. It’s at the very center of my being. And the quality of your entire being is measured by how much of it you’re willing to give away.”

  I was in danger of getting lost in the metaphor, so I took a stab at what I thought she meant.

  “So the gift of our life is your contribution of love.”

  Her smile was warm like the sun.

  “Exactly,” she said. “I didn’t create you in order to love you. I created you because I love you.”

  I was glad to hear that. I was afraid God created us to keep her company, and we screwed everything up in the Garden of Eden.

  Suddenly I recalled the last conversation I’d had with Goldberg. The one about how messed up religion is in general and Christianity in particular.

  “What about Heaven?” I said. “Is there such a place?”

  God attached the transom to the tripod.

  “There is,” she replied. “I created the heavens and the earth at basically the same time.”

  “And good people end up going there, right? To heaven, I mean.”

  God nodded. “That’s why I created it, yes.”

  And being a good Christian will help me become a good person.”

  Another nod.

  I thought hard about my next question. I wanted to make sure I got it right before I spoke. Finally I just ended up saying it.

  “So is Christianity the only road to Heaven?”

  Instead of answering me, God kept fiddling with the transom. She’d take a sighting, twist a couple knobs, then take another sighting, then twist a couple more knobs. I couldn’t tell if she was stalling or trying really hard to make sure she got the measurement right.

  “Think of it this way,” she replied finally. “Christianity is the only road to Heaven, but I’ve made provisions that allow other religions to travel that road.”

  I had no idea what she meant.

  “OK, here’s what I really want to know,” I said. “Will there be Jews in Heaven?”

  God winked at me.

  “Jesus was a Jew,” she said. “And he’s in Heaven.”

  “But,” I countered, “will there be Jews in Heaven who don’t think of Jesus as your son?”

  “Certainly.”

  I was somewhat surprised. “How about Buddhists?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Muslims?”

  “Quite a few actually.”

  “But how is that possible?” I asked. “Doesn’t Christianity teach that in order to get to Heaven, you have to be, well, a Christian?”

  God spoke with infinite patience.

  “What Christianity teaches,” she said, “is that I loved the world so much that I gave my only son to save it.
That includes everyone, not just the few.”

  I ran that through the mill a couple times.

  “So” I said finally, “it’s possible to believe in Jesus without being a Christian.”

  “Absolutely,” God replied. “The world doesn’t consist of one hundred per cent Christian or non-Christian. Their camps are not so evenly divided. There are people who call themselves followers of Christ who are slowly ceasing to be Christians all together. And there are others who have never heard of Christ, who are great followers of his without realizing it.”

  I had a sudden epiphany, which was wonderful because I don’t get them too often.

  “That sort of levels the playing field, doesn’t it?” I said. “For those people living on an island somewhere in New Guinea who’ve never seen a book much less a Bible.”

  God seemed pleased with my breakthrough.

  “Rachel, I would never exclude anyone based on something as trivial as race or nationality or even religion. My only requirement is that your heart be the same as mine. And if it is, the only thing I ask of you is to give me your hand.”

  Suddenly the doubts I had about Christianity crumbled like a house of cards. Thanks to Goldberg, I had trouble accepting my own religion as true because I thought it taught all other religions were false. What I now understood was that far from excluding people of other Faiths, Christianity embraced them instead.

  “I love all my children,” God continued. “Whether they pray in a church, bow in a mosque, or kneel in a temple. I created them all out of love, and can do nothing but love them regardless of what they think of one another.”

  It was at that moment, while standing in a field the color of gold, surrounded by a cloudless sky, a placid lake and the truth, I came to understand who the man Jesus really was. He was not the Savior of Christianity – he was the Savior of the world.

  “Shall we start measuring now?” God said.

  And so we did.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Entry #51

  Be kinder than necessary to everyone you meet because everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.

  James M. Barrie

  Here’s the way our measuring worked: God established a point fifty meters in the distance through her transom. I’d walk in a straight line to that point, stick a flag in the ground, and wait for her to catch up. She would take another shot and we’d repeat the procedure. As I walked I formulated new questions. When she caught up to me, she answered them. It was a very good system.

  At the first flag I pulled out the notepad with my six questions, and fired away.

  “You say we should love our neighbors, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Even if we don’t like them all that much.”

  God chuckled a little.

  “Especially those you don’t like all that much.”

  As a kid I always wondered how I was supposed to like someone I couldn’t stand. I once asked a nun to explain it but all she gave me was a dirty look, so I quit asking.

  Not that the question went away. I mean, how was I supposed to love the terrorists of the world or the guy who just committed a murder or the woman who left her three kids to fend for themselves while she went out dancing night after night?

  I asked God to help me work through this dilemma.

  She handed me a handful of flags.

  “To begin with,” she said. “You have to understand what the word love means.”

  “I always thought it meant simply liking someone a lot,” I offered.

  “That’s a partial definition,” she said, then indicated I should walk fifty meters to the next point, which I did. When she caught up to me, she picked up our conversation exactly where we left it.

  “Love,” she said, “has several meanings. There’s the romantic love you feel for someone, which is different than the love you feel for your best friend, or even the love you feel for your family. Those are three different and distinct emotions.”

  “But” I said, “I don’t see how I can apply any of them to people I don’t care for.”

  “That’s because there’s a fourth love,” she said as she took her next sighting. “The Greek word for it is agape.”

  I told God it sounded familiar but I wasn’t sure what it meant.

  “It means,” she said, “that no matter what people do to you by way of insult, injury or humiliation, you will never wish them harm.”

  God set up her transom and began another round of measurements.

  “Agape,” she continued, “is a feeling of the mind, Rachel, as much as the heart, the will as much as the emotions. It is the deliberate effort to only wish the best for those who wish for you the worst.”

  …the deliberate effort to only wish the best for those who wish for you the worst.”

  That was so good I yanked out my notebook and wrote it down.

  “So does that mean if someone hits me, I shouldn’t hit them back?”

  “No, no,” God replied. “That’s different. If someone spits in your face, you don’t have to say it’s raining. Hitting someone who hits you without cause is not revenge, it’s self-defense. But if someone calls you a name, it is not necessary to call him one in return.”

  “So I don’t necessarily have to like someone to love him,” I said.

  “Precisely. Always remember that kindness is within your power even when fondness is not.”

  I wrote that one down too.

  Suddenly it occurred to me how I could love the only person in the world I ever hated: Old Man Martin.

  Martin lived next door to us when I was a kid. He had more hate in him than anyone I’ve ever known. He hated kids, animals, traffic, the weather, you name it, he hated it. Once he called the police on me and my brother because he claimed we knocked out one of his windows with a baseball. Actually we did knock out one of his windows, but here’s the thing: he only called the police after we went over to apologize for it. He didn’t even know it was broken until we told him.

  But that’s not why I hated him.

  I hated him because he poisoned my dog.

  My dog Echo dug a hole under our fence and got into Martin’s trash, dragging some of it out into the street. Unfortunately, his trash included several magazines with explicit content. By the time Martin figured out what was going on, half the kids in the neighborhood (I was not one of them by the way) were happily ogling the photos right there in front of his house.

  Martin had a meltdown.

  He ran outside, still dressed in a bathrobe, flailing his arms and yelling for everyone to get off his street. He didn’t call the police though. He was probably too embarrassed to get them involved. He just grabbed his magazines and stormed back in the house, muttering words I’d never heard before.

  Two days later Echo was dead.

  The Vet said he’d eaten a poisoned piece of meat that was still in his stomach. Everyone knew who did it but it was impossible to prove.

  And so I grew to hate Old Man Martin. When you’re a kid there aren’t many things worse than knowing you have a dog-killer living next to you. But when he kills your dog, it’s ten times worse. It’s like he killed a member of our family, and got away with it. I hated him for it.

  Today, however, just this minute in fact, agape taught me that I could actually love a man like Old Man Martin without really liking him. I didn’t have to have warm, fuzzy thoughts for him. All I had to do was tell myself that if I ever got the chance to kill his dog, I wouldn’t do it.

  So that’s what I did. I told myself exactly that.

  And the moment I made that conscious decision, I felt a sudden load being lifted from my shoulders. Literally. It was almost a physical sensation of becoming somehow lighter, more buoyant. It was the same feeling I had the first time I met God.

  And in having that sensation, I had this thought: For twenty-one years I’d carried with me the weight of hatred for a man I barely knew. And somehow that particular hatred had poisoned my life much the same
as he had poisoned my dog.

  Was that possible?

  Surely not. Surely I was too mature for that.

  But if it was possible, what other forms of hatred or anger or unconscious bitterness was I holding onto that were equally as poisonous?

  I looked at God who was looking at me.

  She smiled.

  “Agape makes life easier, doesn’t it?” she said.

  I told her it did.

  “All you need is love,” she said.

  I told her it was.

  And then we went back to work.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Entry #42

  Everyone says forgiveness is such a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.

  C.S. Lewis

  “You said you love all your children, right?” I asked.

  God was busy with another measurement.

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  “And that means everyone, even those who don’t love you.”

  “Especially those who don’t love me.”

  I fought with asking the next question. In fact, I decided not to ask it when, much to my surprise, it popped out anyway.

  “Do you love someone who commits murder?”

  God pushed her glasses onto her forehead, which I thought was either a really good or a really bad sign. I was pretty sure by now that if I upset her, she wasn’t going to turn me into a lizard or anything, but I hated the idea that I might offend her.

  Turns out it was a good sign.

  “Yes,” she said, “I love a murderer, but not in the way you think of love. I have no admiration or affection for him. I love him in that I created him; he is one of my children.”

  “Does it bother you,” I said, “when they harm other people?”

  “It breaks my heart,” God said. “But it doesn’t diminish my love for them.”

  She went back to the transom.

  “Nor,” she continued, “does it mean I will quit trying to help them change.”

  Once again I wasn’t sure if I was crossing the line with my questions, but there was something I had to clarify.

  “Are there any sins you won’t forgive?”

  “No,” she said. “None whatsoever.”

  “OK,” I said, “let’s say Adolph Hitler, on his deathbed, asked forgiveness. Would you have given it?”

  God answered without hesitation.

  “Yes,” she said then quickly added. “If it was sincere.”

  I was surprised. Somehow I expected her to tell me what a vile and despicable creature Hitler was, and that she had reserved a special little place in Hell just for him. One that was hotter than normal.

  “But let me make one thing clear,” she continued. “Hitler did not ask for forgiveness. In fact, he couldn’t.”

  “He couldn’t ask?” I said. “Why not?”

  God handed me another flag.

  “Because the kind of remorse that merits my forgiveness does not occur instantaneously. Contrition is a gradual process. Deathbed confessions are seldom sincere. More often than not, when someone confesses their sins at the moment of death, it’s not because he’s sorry, it’s because he suddenly believes in Hell.”

  I started to laugh but didn’t because God said it with a straight face.

  “Does that mean Hell is a real place?” I asked.

  “Yes, most certainly.”

  This was a major letdown. I was secretly hoping that Hell was something the early Christians made up as a scare tactic to keep people on the straight and narrow. I know it worked for me as a kid. The image of fire and brimstone gave me more than a couple nightmares. I’m not sure it actually kept me from doing some things I shouldn’t have, but it was always at the back of my mind as I was doing them.

  I asked God about the fire and brimstone part.

  “The best way to describe Hell,” she said, “is that it is eternal separation from me. A separation, by the way, that is much worse than a fiery furnace.”

  Suddenly my stomach dropped.

  “Does that mean Satan is real, too?”

  “Oh, yes,” she replied. “Satan exists. He doesn’t have hooves, horns and a forked tail, but he’s real. Very real.”

  What does he look like?”

  “Like anything or anyone he wishes,” she said. “He’s the Great Chameleon. The Dark Changling.”

  This was not going well at all.

  “Then is he someone who can harm me physically?” I said.

  God shook her head.

  “No, I would never allow that. First and foremost, Satan is a liar. He’s known in Hell as Diabolos or Deceiver. In fact, his greatest deception is convincing people he doesn’t even exist.”

  We arrived at the next spot and again God set up her surveying equipment. I flipped open my notebook, anxious to go onto another question. I’d heard enough about the Great Chameleon for now.

  “How old is the earth?” I asked.

  God adjusted a couple knobs on the transom.

  “The latest estimate your scientists have is around 14 billion years, give or take.”

  “Is that accurate ?”

  “Not even close,” she said. “It’s twice that age. But ‘The Big Bang Theory’ is a very good explanation of how it all started.”

  I was thrilled for some reason.

  “So,” I exclaimed. “There was an explosion after all!”

  “Oh my, yes,” God said. “It was enormous. I made sure of that. In fact, it was so great that the earth is still receiving sound waves generated by it.”

  This idea staggered me.

  “Do you mean we can still hear the Creation?”

  “Absolutely,” God replied. “Anyone can. Turn on your radio, and switch it between stations. That static you hear – a very small portion of it – is the actual sound of the Creation 28 billion years ago. Your scientists call it cosmic background radiation, but nicknamed it ‘God’s Whisper.’ I always liked that name.”

  Suddenly a related thought popped into my head.

  “What about evolution?” I asked.

  “What about it?”

  “It’s such a big controversy. Some people believe we evolved over a long period of time. Others believe you created us the way we are now.”

  “What do you think?” God asked.

  This was the first time God asked what I thought before she gave me the answer. It was a tactic Goldberg used, but with God it felt different. It felt like she really wanted to know what I thought.

  “I want to believe in the Creation story,” I said. “But it’s hard to ignore the fossil record.”

  A thin smile spread across her face.

  “And what does the fossil record show?” she asked.

  “That we evolved over a long period of time.”

  “And what does the Bible say?”

  I took my time with this one. I wanted to make sure I got it right. Finally I answered with a degree of certainty.

  “That you created us the way we are.”

  The thin smile widened.

  “Are you sure it doesn’t just say that God created man and woman in God’s own image?”

  Again I took my time.

  “OK,” I conceded. “Technically that’s probably what it says, but it does say you did it in one day.”

  “When Moses wrote that,” God said, “he didn’t mean twenty-four hours. To me a day is a thousand years and a thousand years a day.”

  “So which one is right?” I asked. “Creation or evolution?”

  “They both are,” she replied. “Creation and evolution are different sides of the same coin. They can and do co-exist.”

  I felt a headache coming on. That happens when I’ve been using my brain more than normal.

  “I’m still not sure I understand,” I said.

  God kneeled down and with a stick began drawing figures in the dirt. The first figure was a fish, followed by a bird, then what appeared to be a monkey, but could have been my Uncle Sal who was so hairy he had to s
have his back. Last of all she drew the outline of a man.

  “If,” she said, “evolution means that a positive thing called a fish evolved over a long period of time into a positive thing called man, then evolution is a non-issue.”

  She drew a circle that encompassed all the figures.

  “Why should it matter,” she said, “if I chose to create man slowly rather than quickly? Especially since time, as you know it, doesn’t exist for me.”

  I concentrated hard. Finally it hit me.

  “Then Darwin got it right,” I said with surprise.

  God nodded. “Most of it, yes. But then so did Moses.”

  I liked that. It was nice to know one side could be right without the other being wrong. I wish more of life was like that.

  We both stood then and surveyed our work for the day. We had a large rectangular area of grass, marked by white flags at fifty meter intervals, with a large lake at one end.

  “This is a good beginning,” God said. “What do you think?”

  “What exactly is it that we’re building?” I asked.

  She winked at me.

  “Something magical,” she said.

  Without further explanation, I got two impressions: one, whatever we were building was going to be a surprise; and two, our day’s work was done.

  “It’s time for me to go, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, and again thanked me for spending the day with her, like it meant as much to her as it did me.

  Then she hugged me. And once again the touch of God’s skin against mine was marvelous. Hers was satin-smooth and cool like porcelain, and she smelled just like God did yesterday, fresh-out-of-the-shower clean, but this time with a hint of jasmine. As I pressed my head to her chest I felt her heartbeat against my cheek. She seemed so human and yet so much more. A moment later I closed my eyes, and just like that, I was back in St. Michael’s.

  Twenty minutes later I was home.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Entry #25

  If someone proved to me that God is outside the truth, then I should prefer to remain with God rather than with the truth.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  As soon as I walked into my apartment, I checked my phone messages. There were none. I wasn’t all that surprised. Just because I’d called my mother out of the blue was no reason why she should return the favor, even though I’d asked her to. It occurred to me that maybe she had tried and I wasn’t home, so I checked all incoming calls. There were two: one from a number I didn’t recognize and one from the same area code as my mother’s but not her home or cell phone. Maybe she got a new cell phone. Maybe she got a new home. Either way, it gave me hope that at least she’d tried to get in touch with me, and even false hope is better than no hope at all.

  After dinner, I plopped down in my reading chair and went back through the events of the day.

  The morning had started off with a surprise when God showed up looking like someone else. But that shouldn’t have surprised me really; after all, the way she appeared to me was not even close to what she actually looked like, which was sunlight.

  One time Joe asked me, Rachel, what would happen if we get to Heaven, and find out that God’s black? Or female? Or both? Wouldn’t that be great?

  I told him it would be great. Of course at the time I had no idea that God was also elderly and white, and who knows what he would be tomorrow. Which was OK with me – I like surprises.

  Another thing I discovered today is that God has the same emotions I do. When I met her this morning, she was crying. Crying over the fate of her son, which was horrible enough to make any parent cry, but still, it surprised me that after two thousand years, it continued to affect her so.

  Then again who is to say what should or should not bother you when you don’t just have love, but you are love. Try as I may I couldn’t get my head around that one. I think the concept was too big for me to grasp. It was like an ant trying to explain the Internet. But if love was the reason she created us, then who was I to question her motives?

  Suddenly a wonderful thought occurred: Just think, if God loves me so much now when there is so little to love, imagine what it will be like when I clean up my act?

  Up until now I always felt like no matter what I did, it would never be enough to please God, so at some point in time I think I quit trying. Now I had a reason to start all over again. But start over in a less frantic way because I didn’t have to earn her affection – it was free. And free beats earned any day

  What it all boiled down to was this: God’s love is not based on what I do, but who she is. And there’s an unspeakable comfort in knowing that the way she feels about me today is based on knowing the worst about me tomorrow.

  Amazing.

  What was also amazing was the fact that Christianity was not what I had grown to believe it was, which was this fraternity of bishops and priests and nuns who felt they, and they alone, had all the answers. As it turns out, a lot of people outside the Christian faith have answers. Jesus may be the only road to God, but Christianity is not the only road to Jesus. Which was OK by me. At least it gave the other two-thirds of the world’s population an equal chance on reaching Heaven.

  I scratched off the questions in my notebook that we had discussed, and underlined the ones we missed. I figured tomorrow, I’d ask them.

  Next I pulled out my Bible, turned to the first page and read these words:

  In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

  The earth was empty, a formless mass cloaked in darkness.

  And the Spirit of God was hovering over its surface. Then God said,

  “Let there be light,” and there was light.

  And God saw that it was good.

  I’d read this passage as a kid, thinking of it more as a fairy tale than for what it actually was: the simple truth. A poetic yet genuine rendering of how the universe began. Told in a way that made sense to its readers thousands of years ago but one that was still valid for the world I lived in today.

  I glanced at the clock. It was twelve-thirty. I felt tired, but it was the good kind of tired, the kind of tired you get after a full and rewarding day.

  I brushed my teeth and crawled into bed. I lay there for a few minutes before I decided to do two things; one, I said a prayer, which I hadn’t done in I don’t know how long at bedtime. It was short and to the point. I simply thanked God for coming into my life, and that I hoped I wasn’t too much of a disappointment to her.

  The second thing I did was turn on my bedside radio and select a station that produced only static. Then, in the darkness of my bedroom, while the world outside rushed along in its frenzied pace, I listened to the sounds of the universe being created – God’s Whisper – and drifted off into a perfect and dreamless sleep.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Entry #70

  The great tragedy of this age is that we are standing at the crossroads, and the signposts have fallen down.

  Mark Twain

  WEDNESDAY

  I was up early the next morning, showered, ate breakfast, and was on my way to St. Michael’s, all within the hour. As I passed Rainy Day Books, a large poster in the window announced the arrival of the latest installment of the Charlie Winston Chronicles. This was the fifth of seven books chronicling the adventures of a young wizard-in-training Charlie Winston. The first book was released with little fanfare in Great Britain, where I assume witches and wizards are more common, but surprised everyone everywhere when it took the publishing world by storm. Before you knew it, the author was bigger than the Beatles and richer than the Queen of England.

  Standing next to this poster was a woman holding another poster, also about Charlie but not nearly as flattering. Her poster had Charlie’s picture on it, only a set of horns had been painted on the top of his head with a magic marker, and these words were printed beneath his photo:

  Behind this innocent face is the

  power of Satanic Darkness!

&nbs
p; Christians Unite!

  Charlie Winston is the anti-Christ!

  Evidently a very small group of very vocal people with the Bible on their mind and a lot of free time on their hands, not only read the Winston books but read into them all sorts of evil and subversive messages. They called themselves the “Disciples of Truth” or DOT for short. I read the first couple Charlie Winston novels when they first came out, long before anyone found Satan lurking in their pages. All I noticed was a group of hyper-active but run-of-the-mill kids who stumbled onto some exciting adventures with mythical creatures and imaginary villains. None of which were half as scary as the average Grimm’s Fairy Tale or those flying monkey’s in the Wizard of Oz.

  Nevertheless, DOT, whose mission in life was to ferret out the dark forces in children’s literature, decided that Charlie was up to no-good, and that it was their job to stop the children of America from falling into Satanism. The fact that they did it in the name of Christ seemed to me ironic because the ultimate goal of Charlie was to defeat the ultimate bad guy Pendergast, which I thought more or less is what Christianity was all about. Evidently, one group’s Satan is another group’s Savior.

  As I walked past the lone protester, I avoided direct eye contact, but she managed to thrust a flyer into my hand nevertheless.

  “Stop Satan in his tracks,” she said with surprising passion. “Ban Charlie Winston!”

  I thanked her and pretended to read the information she’d given me. I hate to hurt other people’s feelings, regardless of how far removed those feelings are from mine. As soon as I rounded the corner, I chucked the flyer in the nearest waste bin.

  A few minutes later, I reached St. Michael’s, entered the sanctuary and was half-way to the Confessional when it occurred to me to look toward the altar for God. Sure enough, there she was, kneeling in prayer as yesterday. I sat down quietly in the last row of pews and waited.

  It wasn’t more than two minutes that she rose, made the sign of the cross and turned in my direction. As soon as she did, I could tell she was no longer a she. God was once again a man. A middle-aged man, in fact, with distinct Asian features. I barely had time to wonder if maybe this wasn’t God, but an actual member of the church who had just dropped by for an early morning prayer, when he stopped directly in front of me.

  “Good morning, Rachel,” he said. “I hope you slept well.”

  I told him it was the best night’s sleep I’d had in six months.

  God sat down next to me, quietly folded his hands in his lap and stared straight ahead. I mirrored his body language, and we sat like that for a few moments before he spoke.

  “Church buildings are interesting, don’t you think?”

  “Interesting?” I asked. “In what way?”

  “There’s such variety. Some are built on a magnificent scale with spires and arches and leaded stained glass while others are quite simple and plain, with wooden floors and pews.”

  “Do you have a preference?”

  “No,” he replied. “I like diversity – in everything.”

  “How about some of the megachurches today that have gone high-tech?” I asked. “With those big screen TVs and sound systems? Going to their worship service is like going to a rock concert.”

  “Oh, I love what they’re doing!” God replied happily. “Anything that will get people into the seats, especially the young ones.”

  “I used to go all the time, but don’t anymore,” I confessed. “The thing is, I don’t know why. I just sort of drifted away.”

  “That’s the way it usually happens,” God said with a sigh. “Slowly. Very slowly.”

  A sudden thought occurred.

  “So going to church is important,” I said.

  “It’s one of the most important things you can do,” God said.

  “And people who go to church tend to be better people as a result, right?”

  He nodded. “It’s not a guarantee, but more often than not, yes.”

  What I said next surprised me so much I blushed.

  “But some of the meanest people I know go to church all the time.”

  I was referring to Old Man Martin. He was even what they called a deacon at his church, which I think was a big deal.

  “I agree,” God said. “Merely going to church doesn’t make you a better person any more than standing in a garden makes you a flower.”

  I wrote that one down, too.

  “So if going to church doesn’t make you a better person,” I said, “what does?”

  “You become a better person,” God said. “when you’re kind. When you treat others with respect. When you genuinely care for the man who is homeless or child who is hungry. That is what people of faith do.”

  “That’s it?” I said.

  God nodded. “More or less.”

  “Well, heck,” I said. “I care about all kinds of people.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said with a smile. “Caring is good, but what are you doing?”

  Good question.

  Granted, of late, I had little time or energy to think of ways to help the less fortunate because I was one of the less fortunate. But what had I done when times were good? When I had my health, my family and my sanity? Very little I’m afraid. I might donate a sweater or two to the Salvation Army, and once I served meals at a shelter for battered women, but that was about it. Whenever I saw pictures of those skinny little kids starving in Africa or someplace, I just wanted somebody to get them another bowl of rice. I never once thought maybe I should give them that bowl of rice.

  I never thought that. Not once. Ever.

  Why?

  I mean, I had so much and they had so little.

  It was easy to say I didn’t do it because of how busy I was being a daughter, a friend, a wife, and a teacher. I simply didn’t have time. It was much harder to say I didn’t do it because I wasn’t nearly as concerned about them as I led myself to believe.

  I stewed on this revelation about myself a few minutes. It was tough to accept at first, but sometimes the truth is tough.

  Finally I said to God, “I understand what you mean about feeling less and doing more.”

  God smiled while staring straight ahead.

  “I know you do,” he said. “And I appreciate it.”

  We spent the next few minutes just sitting there. We didn’t talk much. We just sat and thought and admired the church we were in. It was a lovely time of silence.

  Finally God stood.

  “Very well,” he said. “We have a big day ahead of us. Shall we go to work now?”

  And so we did.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Entry #9

  There are no shortcuts in life – only those we imagine.

  Thomas Carlyle

  In the blink of an eye, we were once again back at the worksite. At St. Michael’s God was wearing all black: black shirt, slacks and shoes. Now he wore blue jeans, sweatshirt and boots. His sweatshirt bore the University of Notre Dame logo.

  “Are you a fan of the Fighting Irish?” I asked jokingly.

  “Oh, I never miss one of their games,” God said. “Especially when they play Michigan. Now that’s a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon.”

  I was surprised. “Does that mean you favor one team over the other?”

  God allowed me to stare at him for a moment before I noticed that his sweatshirt now had the University of Michigan logo on it.

  “I don’t play favorites,” he said with a smile. “I just like the sport.”

  I told him I felt the same, although I was a Cubs fan, which was sort of like not having a sports team. I meant it as a joke, and that’s the way God took it because he laughed.

  “You might be surprised how the Cubbies do in a couple years,” he said.

  I made a mental note of that, just in case I got a chance to bet on them.

  “OK,” God announced. “On Monday we found the ground, on Tuesday we surveyed it, today we’re going to mow it.”

  “Mow it?” I asked.
“With what?”

  He pointed behind me.

  “With that,” he said.

  Behind me was a huge green tractor, a bush hog I think they call it, with not one but two seats. God climbed behind the wheel.

  “Hop on,” he said. “This is going to be fun.”

  I plopped down into the passenger seat.

  “Are you all-powerful?” I asked.

  God turned the key in the ignition and the tractor came to life, but without the loud roar I’d expected.

  “Yes,” he said, in answer to my question.

  “And all-powerful means you can do just about anything you want?”

  God shifted into gear, pressed the accelerator and the tractor lurched forward.

  “Yes,” he said again.

  “Then wouldn’t it be quicker, just to blink your eyes and whatever it is we’re building would, you know, just appear?”

  “Ah,” God said, “but is quicker always better?”

  “It may not be better,” I answered. “But it would be more efficient.”

  God looked at me with a twinkle in those Asian eyes.

  “Then the question becomes,” he said, “is more efficient better?”

  If Goldberg had been asking these questions, I would have felt I was being challenged. As it was, I got the feeling I was in the process of learning something.

  “But isn’t anything done more efficiently usually better?” I asked.

  God shifted gears and our speed increased.

  “Remember when you were ten years old,” he said. “And you and your brother Steve built that wonderful tree house?”

  Which of course I did. Vividly.

  “Yes,” I said. “How could I forget it? We worked on it all summer long.”

  “Remember the feeling you had when you just finished the job?” he said. “When you stood back and looked at what you’d accomplished?”

  Which of course was easy to do also. Originally Steve and I asked Dad to build it for us but he declined, which surprised us both a little. So we did it ourselves.

  We found just the right tree and somehow managed to haul all our materials to just the right spot and built a fairly impressive platform, walls and a roof. All summer long, we worked and worked and worked on it, in the heat, humidity, wind and rain, fighting off mosquitoes (it was Georgia, after all) and flies while ignoring minor cuts, mashed thumbs and splinters galore. On the day it was finally done, we stood back with a small sense of wonder, awe almost, and admired our handiwork. It was a very special feeling; one that had stuck with me all these years.

  “Sometimes,” God said. “work is its own reward.”

  “OK, I get it,” I said.

  God smiled. “Excellent. Now, what would you like to talk about today?”

  I pulled out my notebook and fired away.

  “Have you ever done anything you’ve regretted?” I asked.

  God shook his head.

  “No, never,” he said then laughed. “Although the hairless cat didn’t turn out quite the way I planned.”

  I told him we had a cat once. Her name was Goldie. She lived to be fourteen years old, which was amazing considering all the dogs in the neighborhood were out to get her.

  “Goldie was a sweet pet,” God said. “And a very good climber. I made sure her claws stayed nice and sharp.”

  Which I thought was interesting.

  “You mean you keep an eye on pets, like you do us?”

  “I keep an eye on everything,” he said. “It’s what I do. It’s my job.”

  “So you’ve never done anything you wished you hadn’t.”

  God thought for a moment then shook his head.

  “No,” he replied. “But I’ve surprised myself a few times.”

  “Surprised yourself? How is that possible? I thought you knew everything.”

  “I do know everything,” God answered. “But after the Creation, I gave myself a little on-off switch. Whenever I choose, I can flip that switch and I no longer see what you know as the future, I live only in the present.”

  We reached the far edge of the ground we’d measured, turned and head back in the opposite direction.

  “That’s why everyday is as fresh and exciting for me as it is for you,” he said. “I have absolute confidence that the world is going to turn out well because I know how it’s going to end. And knowing that allows me to, as you might say, sit back and enjoy the ride.”

  I had to admit this was a side of God I had not anticipated: the human side. But why not? He said that he created us in his image. I just never thought the two images would be so similar.

  We spent the rest of the day mowing, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, which may sound boring but wasn’t, it was fun. Plus I got to keep firing questions at God and he kept firing answers right back at me. In the course of the afternoon, he explained how Moses didn’t really cross the Red Sea but crossed a body of water called the Sea of Reeds, which was a lot smaller but still a pretty big deal anyway. I also found out how Noah got all those animals on that boat of his; why Cain killed Abel and what a great guy King David was until he fell in love with a married woman and had her husband killed so he could marry her. David was still a great guy afterwards, but he spent the rest of his life making up for his mistakes. Which in a way was comforting. If God would let a guy like him off the hook, it wasn’t so farfetched that he would do the same with me. My mistakes didn’t seem so big after all.

  I also found out there were actually eleven commandments but God changed his mind at the last minute and cut one. After hearing what the eleventh commandment was, I was really glad he did. It would have been a tough one to keep.

  Much to my surprise, I found out that the story of Jonah and the whale really did happen. Jonah was a little bitty guy who got tossed overboard when his buddies accused him of being a jinx, and a whale swallowed him whole but after a couple days puked him up instead.

  How anyone could survive for three days in a whale’ stomach was amazing. The smell alone would have killed me.

  Another big surprise was the story of Adam and Eve. Turns out it wasn’t an apple that Eve took a bite of, but a pomegranate. It was changed to apple because no one could spell pomegranate. Plus it wasn’t a snake that tricked them into doing it. It was Satan. Who disguised himself to look like a snake, to throw them off the track.

  Interesting the things you can learn when you go straight to the horse’s mouth.

  When the day was done, God and I looked back at our handiwork. The ground we mowed was smooth and uniform, almost carpet-like. It looked like the outfield at Wrigley Field.

  God turned off the mower’s engine.

  “Well, Rachel,” he said. “I guess that about wraps it up for today. Thank you so much for your time and questions. I really appreciate them both.”

  Before I left though I asked God what he thought about the ruckus some people were making over the fictional character Charlie Winston. He just shook his head and gave me a two-word answer:

  “Misguided passion.”

  Which was pretty much what I thought he’d say.

  We hugged then, as we did every day. Within seconds I was back at St. Michael’s.

  But the day was far from being over.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Entry #6

  Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

  Helen Keller

  It was raining when I stepped outside St. Michael’s, which I hadn’t prepared for. I had no umbrella. It was one of those rains that looked like it wasn’t going to let up for a while, so I walked back into the sanctuary to wait it out. I chose a seat in the back row. A few minutes later the front door opened and a man walked in from the street.

  I make it a rule not to stare at someone unless he can’t tell that I’m staring at him, which was the case this time. I was far enough removed from the aisle and deep enough in a shadow that I was invisible. The man sat down ten rows in front of me. A moment lat
er he turned in profile. When I saw who it was I almost fell out of my pew.

  It was Buddy Timmons.

  My stomach did a little flip-flop, which it does when I see someone I’d just as soon forget. I stared at him for a moment then decided I’d start my walk home. A little bit of rain was better than staying here. Just as soon I stood, however, Buddy did the only thing that could make me sit back down again – he placed his head in both hands and started crying.

  Typically the sight of someone crying elicits in me a sympathetic response. In fact, I’ve been known to start crying just because I’m around someone who’s crying. But this was Buddy Timmons. The same Buddy Timmons who fired me at the worst possible time in my life, then told me it was no big deal because I was sure to land on my feet. Which never happened. And somehow I think he knew it wasn’t going to happen either; but it was no skin off his nose to tell me something nice when deep down he knew he was doing something awful. Now that the tables were turned a little, I had zero interest in showing him the level of kindness he denied me. And if I was honest with myself, which sometimes I am, I was sort of glad that something was bothering him to the point of tears.

  I got up again and made my escape, glad to be out of there before Buddy figured out I was spying on him. I’d gone maybe a dozen steps in the direction of home when quite gently and unexpectedly, I heard the words Kindness is within your power even when fondness is not.

  I abruptly stopped walking. It wasn’t like I actually heard a voice, not like I did that time in my bedroom; I thought these words more than heard them. It was my conscience speaking, which sometimes can be louder than someone shouting at you.

  Kindness is within your power even when fondness is not.

  There it was again.

  Of course I recognized this as something God had told me earlier in the day, when talking about agape. And so I did what I did with Old Man Martin the dog-killer. I told myself that given the opportunity, I would never fire Buddy Timmons the way he fired me. I would let him down gently and not pretend that it was no big deal and tell him how rosy the future was going to be. Also, I promised that if he had kids, I would at least get their names right.

  This was agape, I told myself. This was love.

  But somehow I didn’t feel that sense of relief I did when applying agape to Old Man Martin. No weight seemed to lift from my shoulders. Something was different. Something, in fact, was wrong. I had no idea what it was, but finally decided I didn’t have time to figure it out. I kept walking.

  When I got home I checked my messages. There were none, from my mom or anyone else, which was OK because I wasn’t quite sure what to say to her or anyone else anyway. I chose not to call her again. As far as I was concerned, the ball was in her court. At least for now.

  After I took a shower and ate dinner, I turned off the lights and climbed into my reading chair to think about the day. I tried to recall the events chronologically, beginning with the angry woman who hated Charlie Winston. God dismissed her efforts with two words: misguided passion, which was an accurate way to sum it up. If only she, and people like her, would take half the time and energy they put into making up signs and standing outside book stores, and put it into something that mattered, like, well, I’m not sure what she could have been doing, but at least something constructive, think of all the good that could be accomplished. That would be well-guided passion.

  Granted, I wasn’t doing any of those constructive things myself, but I knew that I soon would. Now that I understood the importance of doing over caring, I was a believer in helping others.

  I pulled out my notebook and wrote this: Volunteer.

  As soon as I did, I felt better. Better about me, which is something I hadn’t felt in a long, long time. Funny how just making the decision to do something good becomes something good.

  God and I also talked about how going to church wasn’t a guarantee that you would become a better person, although it improved your odds considerably.

  The last thing I did before going to bed was pull out my Bible. I opened it at random, and here’s what I read from a book named Mark.

  “So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received, and it will be yours.”

  This passage was written in red ink, which meant Jesus was talking, so I paid really close attention. Not that I don’t pay attention to what the other guys wrote, but when it appeared in red, it was especially important. What Jesus seemed to be saying was that God would give me just about anything I asked for, as long as I asked while praying.

  Was that possible?

  Anything?

  There had to be a catch. Something told me that whether I liked it or not, God was going to give me what I needed, not what I think I wanted. Nevertheless I was determined to get to the bottom of it when I got the chance.

  I said a short thank-you prayer then and turned off the light. I was physically tired but mentally wide awake. Sometimes when this happens, I get stuck on one word that keeps repeating itself in my head for some reason. The word tonight was psychological.

  I thought how odd it is that we live in such a psychological world today. A world in which we know so much about why we do the things we do that it makes us feel smarter than any generation before us. Thanks to Goldberg and some information I picked up online, I was now familiar with behavior modification, avoidance syndromes and conditioned responses, not to mention a whole slew of defense mechanisms that I’m told help keep me sane. Thanks to my numerous rounds of therapy, I know about projecting my needs and fears onto others. And how my problems with my mother are deeper and more dangerous than even Freud realized. I’m not sure if all this psychological information was accurate but I do know a lot of people I’ve met recently are good at talking about it. Including me. Which is not a bad thing in itself – the ability to clinically describe what’s going on inside your own head. But what I’d really like to know is what’s going on inside my heart. In fact, having all this technical knowledge makes me wonder this: will I ever be as articulate about my spiritual journey as I am about my psychological one? And in the end, isn’t my spiritual journey the one I should be more concerned with?

  It may not sound like much now, but this train of thought was a major breakthrough for me intellectually. Normally, I don’t think this deeply. Certainly not late at night when I’m trying to go to sleep. Before I met God, when I went to bed, I’d drink some milk, close my eyes and hope for the best. But it was apparent that spending time with the Almighty was changing not just the way I thought about things, but it was changing me as well. I’m not sure it was making me smarter, but it was certainly making me more inquisitive. And nine times out of ten, inquisitive people find out more than people who don’t care one way or the other. I used to be one who didn’t care. Now I do. Now I care a lot. A new me was beginning to take shape.

  And I liked her.

  THIRTY

  Entry #21

  Better to have lived your life as though there were a God, and in the end find out you were wrong, than to have lived your life as though there were no God, and in the end find out you were wrong.

  Blaise Pascal

  THURSDAY

  I was up early the next morning, excited to get to church and continue the discussion about the nature of God, me, and everything in between. I had just finished my shower when I caught a glimpse of someone in the mirror that made me stop and stare. It was me. The woman staring back was not the one I remembered from just a few days prior, however. The Rachel I last recalled had bags under her eyes and little crow’s feet that no twenty-eight-year-old should have, and a pale complexion and lifeless hair. What I saw now was the Rachel I used to be before my life went into the toilet. The woman in the mirror had bright, clear eyes, some pink on her cheeks and the hint of a smile, even though nothing at the time was funny.

  Apparently, without my knowledge or assistance, the old Rachel had returned. I could swear I’d even lost weight, but then realized that going
most of the day without so much as eating a grape was bound to help me shed a few pounds here and there.

  I turned from one side to the other, admiring both my figure and face, which is not something I had done in a long time. Lately, when passing a mirror, I’d distract myself by looking at my feet so that my reflection would not come into play. But this morning, I liked what I saw. It wasn’t perfect but I didn’t expect or need perfect. I’d settle for average any day.

  I ate a slice of toast, drank some juice and hit the sidewalk almost at a trot. After a few blocks I slowed down. I didn’t want to draw unwanted attention. I prefer to blend in rather than stand out.

  As I passed Rainy Day Books, I noticed sitting in the display case next to the latest Charlie Winston novel, another book entitled The God Hoax subtitled, The Search for a God Who Wasn’t There.

  The author was well-known atheist Christopher Hardwick. I’d not read the book but I had seen him on TV once, on a day-time Talk Show, hosted by three women, two of whom were former actresses and the third I think was a Miss America at one time. Oddly enough all three women looked the same, even though one was black and the other two white. The other guests on the show included a rabbi, a priest and a woman named Giselle. I think Giselle was a witch. I’m not saying that to be mean. She really was a witch, or as she preferred to be called: a Wiccan.

  Each guest represented different views on religion. The priest stated that faith was not a matter of knowing but experiencing God. He said that one had to believe the truth of his existence before the truth was revealed. In essence, believing is seeing. The rabbi argued that keeping the Law of Moses was the key to a relationship with God. The witch talked at length about her many beliefs but, for the life of me, I have no idea what she said. Whatever it was, it had little to do with God or even religion for that matter. She seemed more interested in advertising an upcoming Wiccan seminar she was conducting at a nearby hotel, for the “insanely” low price of two-hundred dollars, which included a booklet, lunch and a little gold pin in the shape of a pentagram.

  Hardwick was less metaphysical. He said that anyone who believed in God was living in a fool’s paradise, and that the only proof for the existence of a divine being was lodged in the pea-sized brains of people who were either too dense to comprehend the truth or too emotionally damaged to accept it.

  Hardwick struck me as very bright, articulate and angry. He kept using words like insipid and pathetic and moronic, plus phrases with biological characteristics like theological flatulence or constipated logic and breath-taking hypocrisy. No matter what the priest said, Hardwick shot him down with scientific data that was part physics, part quantum mechanics and part in-your-face sarcasm. He was just as tough on the rabbi, whose face seemed to get redder by the minute. The only one who got off easy was the witch. It could have just been me, but it seemed that whenever she and Hardwick exchanged glances, there was something going on outside the realm of religion.

  It was just a matter of time before their amiable chatter digressed into a shouting match as each guest struggled to be heard over the other. Before long the rabbi got mad and started yelling, as did the priest, followed by the witch. Pretty soon the whole thing sort of blew up. No punches or spells were thrown but it was touch-and-go for a few minutes.

  The rabbi came off almost as angry as Hardwick. The priest was even madder. He had a vein on his forehead that looked like it was going to pop at any moment. The best thing the witch had going for her was her cleavage. And sitting right in the middle of them all, brimming over with smug confidence, was the atheist who started it all.

  After a few minutes of chaos, the three look-alike hostesses cut to a commercial break. When they returned, the stage was bare, except for the priest who was kind of old and was being helped off the set.

  Of course, the main thing that stood out now about all of Hardwick’s brilliant rhetoric and no-nonsense logic was this: he was wrong. There was a God. And I was getting ready to spend the day with him. Again. How someone as smart as him could be so self-assured and inaccurate at the same time amazed me. The fact that his book was on the Best Seller List was even more amazing. But that only goes to prove that a bad idea is still a bad idea, even if a lot of people buy into it.

  I also couldn’t help but think, Boy, is Christopher Hardwick going to be in for a surprise some day. But instead of finding that thought delightful, like I would have just a week earlier, today I found it sad. Sad that one day Christopher Hardwick was going to wake up and, instead of telling people what fools they were for believing in a Higher Power, he was going to come face-to-face with that Higher Power. What would he say then? Would it matter? Probably not. The sad fact of the matter was this: for most of his adult life, Christopher Hardwick had simply backed the wrong horse. And when the end comes, I’m pretty sure two things are going to happen: one, he will know it, and two, he will regret it.

  I took out my notebook and wrote down one word: Christopher Hardwick. Which I guess is really two words, but one atheist. Given the chance, I wanted to ask God what he thought of him.

  Finally I reached St. Michael’s and went in. I took my seat in the last row and waited for God to finish his or her prayers, as the case may be. Within a few moments, he rose, turned and I could see that sure enough he had changed gender again.

  Today she was a heavy-set Samoan woman, dressed in what I guessed was a brightly-colored Mumu, although I’m not sure that’s what she would have called it. As she approached I could see that she had the sweetest smile on her face, but it wasn’t like she was getting ready to laugh. It was just a sweet expression. Somehow her eyes seemed to be smiling, also. Even if I hadn’t known who she was, I would have liked her instantly.

  “Good morning, Rachel,” she said. “You’re here early.”

  I asked if that was OK.

  “I like starting early,” she said as she took a seat to me.

  As we had for the past several days, we sat in silence for a moment. It had become one of my favorite parts of the day. Simply sitting and thinking and staring at the concrete Jesus on the far wall. Finally I spoke.

  “I ran into someone here yesterday afternoon,” I said.

  God looked straight ahead.

  “You mean Bernard?”

  I wasn’t sure who Bernard was, then realized it was Buddy Timmons’s real name.

  “Yes,” I replied. “Do you know him?”

  “I do. But then I know everyone.”

  I wasn’t sure this was any of my business but I asked anyway.

  “He looked like he was in pretty rough shape,” I said. “In fact, I think he might have been crying.”

  God’s great Samoan face flickered with a hint of sorrow.

  “Buddy’s dying,” she said wistfully. “Of cancer. When you saw him here yesterday, he had just come from the doctor.”

  I almost said Oh, my God, but managed to shorten it to just “Oh, my, Guh…”

  The last thing I wanted to do was take the Lord’s name in vain.

  “How long does he have?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid that’s between Buddy and me,” God answered.

  “Will it be painful?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “I’m afraid so. At the end anyway. But the physical pain is secondary right now to the emotional battle he’s fighting.”

  I was getting sadder by the moment.

  “How’s his family doing?” I wondered aloud.

  “Bernard doesn’t have a family,” God replied.

  I was surprised to hear that, but then I didn’t really know anything about Buddy, other than he had a fake eye and a bad comb-over.

  “No wife?” I asked. “Family, kids, friends?”

  “No,” God said. “Bernard never married. Both his parents are gone. There are no brothers or sisters, and no real friends to speak of.”

  “After I left the church,” I confessed, “I felt the strangest sensation, like I should talk to him or try and help him out, but ended up not doing it.”<
br />
  God nodded. “I know. You realize that strange feeling you had was me, right?”

  I was puzzled. “You?”

  She continued without looking at me.

  “More often than not,” she said, “the voice of your conscience is me speaking to you.”

  Which was an unsettling thought. I couldn’t count the number of times that that little voice had tried to get me to do something nice and I didn’t do it. Of course I had a dozen good excuses for not doing it, but in the end what mattered most was my convenience. I was much more likely to do a kind thing if it didn’t require too much time or effort.

  “But what could I do or say to Buddy that would have made a difference?” I asked.

  “Sometimes,” God answered, “you don’t have to say or do anything. Just listening is enough.”

  “Sort of like with my mom?”

  “Exactly like with your mom.”

  I detected a dilemma.

  “But how can I tell the difference between you talking to me and me talking to me?” I asked.

  “For one,” God answered, “I will never tell you to do anything that is mean-spirited, unethical or immoral; and two, if that little voice tries to convince you of something in very complicated terms, it’s not me.”

  “But aren’t life’s questions complicated?” I asked.

  “Yes,” God said. “But the answers seldom are.”

  I was glad to hear that. Sometimes I think I think too much. I tend to turn little problems into big problems through analysis. It was nice to hear that not only is simple better, but it’s also more accurate.

  I told God the next time my conscience told me to help Buddy, or anyone for that matter who looked like they needed a hand-up, that I was going to do it.

  She smiled and patted my leg.

  “I know you will,” she said. “Now, are you ready for work?”

  I told her I was and away we went.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Entry #45

  In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.

  Martin Luther

  When we arrived at the worksite, the first thing I noticed were dozens of miniature trees, each no more than two feet tall, still wrapped in their little burlap bags. On the ground in front of us were two shovels.

  “Landscaping today, huh,” I said.

  God picked up one of the shovels.

  “There’s nothing like planting a few trees to make you feel alive,” she said. “Don’t worry though, the ground is soft. We won’t have to work too hard.”

  I grabbed the other shovel and we began digging and planting and feeling alive. After the second tree, I started the conversation.

  “I read in the Bible last night something about prayer. It said that anything we ask for, you would give to us. Does that mean if I ask for a million dollars, I’ll get it?”

  I could see the hint of a smile on God’s face.

  “Do you think that’s what it means?” she asked.

  I returned the smile.

  “No, not really,” I said. “I was kind of hoping though.”

  She chuckled. “There’s nothing wrong with money, Rachel. It’s the love of money that gets people into trouble.”

  “So, do you answer every prayer?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “It may not be the answer you expect. In fact, you might not even recognize my answer. But I hear every prayer and respond in time.”

  I thought about some of my prayers. Lately most of them were asking God to help me out with something that was bothering me, like death and depression. It was only recently that I began praying to say thank-you.

  “Do you ever get tired of people asking you for help?” I said.

  God shook her head.

  “Not at all,” she replied. “That’s why I invented prayer. So you’d have a way to talk to me. A way to ask for help.”

  This was good to know. For future reference anyway. It might be smooth sailing for me right now, but I was pretty sure the sea would get bumpy again. I did make a mental note, however, to always mix in a couple thank-you prayers with my help-me prayers. I didn’t want God to think I was a cry-baby all the time.

  I consulted my notebook of questions.

  “You’re omniscient, right?” I said.

  “Yes,” God answered.

  “Which means, for better or worse, you know how everything is going to turn out.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Then why should we pray for, say, the outcome of an operation or the recovery of an illness, if the outcome has already been decided?”

  God stopped and looked at me.

  “Rachel, that’s an excellent question,” she said. “One I don’t hear that often.”

  She took her shovel and drew a straight line in the dirt then placed three tic marks on the line an equal distance from one another.

  “This line represents time,” she said. “These three marks represent events in a linear timeline. We’ll call them A, B and C. In your world this is how you view time. One event follows the other in this order.”

  So far so good, I thought to myself. And I continued thinking that right up until the moment the straight line magically moved to form a circle.

  “But this is how time appears to me,” God continued, as if what had just happened was the most natural thing in the world.

  I started to interrupt but was afraid I might miss another geometric miracle.

  “For me,” God continued, “time is not linear but circular. So in my world all events occur simultaneously.”

  She looked at me closely.

  “Does that make sense?” she asked.

  I thought for a moment.

  “No,” I said. “Not really.”

  “Don’t worry,” she laughed. “I lose a lot of people when I do that.”

  She paused a moment then took this approach.

  “Let’s say the operation you asked about is point A and occurs at nine a.m., and your prayer is point B, which occurs at noon.”

  She pointed to A and B, but nothing happened. They stayed right where they were.

  “For me,” she said, “both events occurred at the same moment in time. So, as startling as it sounds, the prayer you offer at noon can partially affect the outcome of an event three hours earlier.”

  I had to stew on that a moment. While I’m actually quite good at understanding literature (with the exception of Shakespeare) I’m at a total loss when it comes to physics. But I gave it a shot nevertheless.

  “So, there’s no past or future for you,” I offered. “There’s only now.”

  “That’s it exactly,” she said. “Time, as you know it, does not exist for me.”

  As I pondered that thought, this thought gradually took shape.

  “Since the cause and the effect occur simultaneously,” I said, “that must mean there are no predetermined results. In fact, circular time does away with predestination all together.”

  The look on God’s face was of obvious joy. I was onto something. I knew it and so did she.

  “Does that mean we can influence your decisions through prayer?” I asked.

  “Absolutely,” God replied. “In fact, I wish there was more of that going on, but that’s not the primary function of prayer.”

  Which really didn’t surprise me.

  “Then what is?” I asked.

  “The function of prayer,” God answered, “is to change the nature of the one who prays. You see, Rachel, most people think that prayer is asking me for something they want, but true prayer is listening to what I tell them is best.”

  “But you will help us, right?” I asked. “If what we’re asking for is good for us and good for others?”

  “Of course I will,” she replied. “But I seldom just give things to you without cause. Whatever you ask for must fall in line with my Will, and there must be an effort on your part. In fact, if more people prayed as though everything depended on me, but worked as
though everything depended on them, the results would be nothing short of miraculous.”

  I wrote that one down, too. It was Journal-worthy for sure.

  “The main thing to remember about prayer is this,” God offered as a final note. “Whatever you ask for, whatever you need, want or desire, ask with a sincere heart, and trust that I will hear you. Then wait for my answer. It will come in due time. I promise you.”

  If I had a nickel for every time someone said, “I promise you,” then failed to follow-through, I’d have enough money to buy, well, I’m not sure what I could buy, but it would probably be something really nice.

  Promises are easy to make and tough to keep.

  Unless you’re God of course. I don’t think God makes promises. Not as we think of them anyway. She makes statements of fact. She says what she’s going to do then does it. Me, I say what I’m going to do then hope it gets done. There’s a pretty big difference.

  Hers is better.

  I guess that’s what makes her God.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Entry #163

  The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.

  Dante Rossetti

  We went back to planting trees then, each of which were labeled Cedar, Maple, Elm or Oak. We spaced them thirty to forty feet apart across the entire field, one at a time. At times we talked as we worked, at other times we didn’t. I soon discovered that for every tree we planted, two more magically appeared in different locations. I asked God about that.

  “I like working,” she said with a wink. “But I didn’t say we had to do all the work.”

  I considered asking if I would ever return to this lake once we were finished, but decided not to; it was enough for now just to help build it.

  Which made me realize something: I was learning to live in the moment. That may have been where God spent all her time but for me it was totally new. The only place I’d lived lately was in the past. And the past was so full of tears and death and general lousiness that it would be OK with me if I never saw it again.

  Between trees I pulled out my notebook. I went down my list of unasked questions.

  “On the way to St. Michael’s this morning,” I said, “I noticed a book in the bookstore. It was entitled The God Hoax.”

  “Oh, I know that book,” God said. “It was written by Christopher Hardwick.”

  This should be interesting, I thought.

  “So what do you think of him?” I said.

  “Christopher’s a very good writer,” she replied. “But not very original. Most of the ideas he claims as his own were ‘borrowed’ from another source: the writer Friedrich Nietzsche. He wrote long before Christopher.”

  I knew a little of Nietzsche’s stuff. I’d read some of it in a college philosophy class.

  “Was he the one who said, ‘I like your Christ. I just don’t like your Christians?’” I said.

  God rolled her eyes and laughed.

  “Yes, that was Friedrich, all right. He wrote a lot of things about me. None of which were very flattering, by the way.”

  “Does that surprise you?” I said. “I mean, after all he was an atheist.”

  “Friedrich was more than an atheist,” God replied sadly. “He was an embittered atheist. It wasn’t so much that he disbelieved in me as much as he just didn’t like me personally.”

  God finished digging a hole and I plopped a tree into it. A maple.

  “It doesn’t sound like you thought very much of him either,” I said.

  “On the contrary,” God replied. “I loved him. To this day, when I think about Friedrich, I feel a great sense of loss, the world’s and mine. Such wasted potential, such misspent talent.”

  She shoveled dirt in around the maple.

  “He was very bright,” she said. “Inquisitive. Funny. Played a marvelous game of chess. He had wonderful insight into people’s minds, and could express it very well in writing.”

  It didn’t surprise me that God might forgive a guy like Nietzsche but I didn’t expect her to have such a high opinion of him, considering his opinion of her couldn’t have been lower.

  “Of course when it came to theology,” she continued, “he got ninety-eight percent of everything wrong. Still, it broke my heart to see him squander that beautiful mind of his trying to prove that either I didn’t exist or, if I did, I wasn’t fit to be God.”

  We walked to the next spot. It was my turn to dig.

  “Nietzsche,” she continued, “felt that all Christians have a psychological need to believe, which is true. What he failed to realize is that all atheists have a psychological need not to believe.”

  “A psychological need?” I asked.

  God nodded. “Atheists may hide behind their intellect but they don’t reject me based on intellectual reasoning or lack of evidence. Atheists reject me because of a moral resistance to admit their need for me.”

  I filed that tidbit away for the next time I talked to Goldberg. I might not bring it up when we spoke but at least it helped me understand why he felt the way he did.

  Our conversation meandered for a while after that. We wandered in and out of different topics.

  She explained rainbows, gravity and why people hiccup. We also talked about time-travel, black holes and the best board game of all time (Monopoly). I found out her favorite color is blue. And that she likes all kinds of music, including the Beatles. Bach was her favorite.

  She was a captivating conversationalist, but what she was really good at was listening. She heard every word I said, and understood everything I meant, even if I wasn’t sure myself. I knew that beneath that brightly-colored Mumu beat the heart of the most sacred person in the universe, but you would never have guessed it by her demeanor. In short, God had become my best friend, which I think is all that she really wanted in the first place.

  Later in the day I realized that the hundred or so trees we started with were all in the ground. I looked across the field. It was newly mowed and filled with the tiny trunks of various trees, none of which were over two or three feet tall, but all of which I knew someday would tower over the entire area.

  “What do you think?” God asked, looking over our day’s work.

  I started out telling her I thought the trees looked great, but what I ended up saying was this.

  “Thank you so much for allowing me do this,” I said. “To help plant these trees, to let me talk to you, ask you questions, spend time with you. These have been the nicest days of my life. I don’t want them to end.”

  “They don’t have to,” God said. “I’ll always be with you.”

  My pulse quickened.

  “When you say with me, do you mean in spirit or in person?”

  She smiled. “A little of both.”

  I told her I would like that.

  Hand in hand we walked back toward the lake. It was growing dark. Just as the sun vanished from sight, it appeared to grow in size and deepen in color. What started out as a pale yellow orb the size of a dime was now the size of a quarter and was a lovely shade of orange.

  I asked God why that always happened.

  “Sunlight,” she explained, “is composed of seven separate wave lengths. At sunset, these wave lengths bend and diffuse at varying degrees so that the only color visible is the shortest. This wave length is a variation of red, which accounts for the color change. The diffusion of these wave lengths in the earth’s atmosphere produces an optical illusion that makes the sun appear to grow in size.”

  It was a great explanation. Sadly though I didn’t understand a word of it.

  She must have realized that.

  “Of course” she said, smiling, “that’s the how. The why is because I thought it was prettier, don’t you?”

  I couldn’t help but smile. I said it was prettier indeed.

  Together then we watched the sun gradually sink beneath the western horizon. When it vanished from sight, she leaned over, hugged me and immediately I found mysel
f back in the Confessional at St. Michael’s.

  My walk home that afternoon was especially nice. Everyone I passed smiled and said hello, friendly as could be. This seldom happened to me. I smiled and said hello in return. After the third or fourth encounter, something occurred to me: before today, when walking, I always looked down at the sidewalk. Today, I looked up at the people. And they looked back, anxious to smile and say hi. Which made me realize it wasn’t a matter of them becoming friendlier, it was a matter of me allowing them to become friendly in the first place.

  Funny the difference a little eye contact makes.

  It doesn’t make people nicer. It just allows the niceness to come out.

  Kindness, I decided, is certainly within my power.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Entry #54

  For my part I know nothing with certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Back in my apartment, I checked my messages. There were three: one from Aunt Dot, one from Aunt Mertis and the last was evidently a wrong number because they hung up without leaving a message. There was none from my mother, which is the one I was hoping for.

  Again I had gone the entire day without eating or drinking, yet still wasn’t hungry. Usually when that happens my blood sugar plummets and I feel like I did that time at my Wedding reception, which was drunk. But now I only felt a little lighter on my feet, which was an OK feeling because usually lighter is better. Just in case my light-footedness might lead to something else, however, like passing out, I fixed myself some tomato soup and half a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. What I really wanted was spaghetti and meatballs, which is my favorite canned-food, but I was out. In fact, I was out of almost everything. A couple weeks of manic depression plus spending time with God each day had thrown me off my grocery shopping routine.

  After dinner, I poured myself a half-glass of chocolate milk and sat in my reading chair to sort through the day. Here’s what I came up with.

  That little voice you sometimes hear in the back of your head may not be you at all. It may be God disguised as you. The way to tell the difference is that God always gives you advice that is above-board and easy to understand. Hence, if your conscience tells you to do something sort of shady or complicated – watch out.

  Also, I discovered that God didn’t have it in for atheists. In fact, she loves them. And on top of that, she doesn’t give up on them while they’re alive, and speaks kindly of them when they’re gone. A guy like Hardwick has no idea how lucky he is.

  The thing we discussed today that I still wasn’t clear about was time, and how God was outside it. I pulled out a piece of paper, drew a circle and put a little stick figure of God in the middle. I placed points A, B and C around the edges, then stared at it, trying to figure out how everything could happen at the same time. For a minute I almost had it but it slipped away. That happens to me a lot. I’m on the verge of a big “Aha moment” then go blank. I tried again to recapture the concept but it was no use – it was gone. I put the diagram aside, deciding I’d come back to it in the morning.

  The final thought I had before going to bed had to do with prayer. I’d heard of this church somewhere that said God wants to give you anything you ask for, and if you ask long enough and hard enough, he’ll just cave in and do it. He’s like this big Cosmic Vending Machine; if you stick in the right amount of tokens, out comes whatever your heart desires.

  Well, God made it fairly clear today that that’s not how she works. She hears prayer all right, and answers them, but not the way we think, want or even know. She responds according to need, not want.

  A puzzling thought however was this: how does God hear every prayer every minute every hour of every day when she’s spending time with me, digging holes, planting trees and explaining sunsets? Do all our prayers come at her all at once? If so, how does she keep them separate from one another? Is it possible that an occasional request of ours might get by her in all the confusion?

  That possibility bothered me until I realized something. If God was smart enough to create an entire universe with who knows how many billion trillion stars, planets and whatnot, then a little thing like attending to what we have to say should be a piece of cake.

  The bottom line was this: just because I didn’t understand how she did it, didn’t mean it couldn’t be done. God had her ways. I just needed to accept that she knew what she was doing, and quit worrying about it.

  I finished up my milk and went to bed. The last thing I did before I turned off the light was pull out my Bible and open it again at random. This is what I read in the fourth chapter of a book called Philippians:

  I have learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it is with a full stomach or empty, with plenty or little. For I can do everything with the help of Christ who gives me the strength I need.

  The secret of living.

  I read those words again, just to make sure I got them right the first time. The secret of living…with plenty or little…I can do everything….

  Was this the key I’d been searching for? The key to becoming the person I couldn’t imagine myself becoming? Could changing my life be so simple?

  When I was in high school, I had the feeling there was a manual out there somewhere that explained not only how you should live but how you should live happily. There had to be one because, well, because everyone I knew was happier than me. They had the manual. They had inside information.

  Now, perhaps I did also.

  I have learned the secret of living.

  What a great concept. And to think, this information was right under my nose all these years. I made a pact right then and there with myself: that when this whole episode with God was over, I was going to read the Bible from start to finish, and not skip ahead to the end like I normally do. If something as big as the secret of living was in there, who knows what else might be.

  I turned off the light and found myself gazing at the moon outside my window. I couldn’t recall it ever looking so big and round and white, even when I was a kid and everything looked bigger than I found it to be in later life. As I stared at it, I couldn’t help but wonder if its appearance, like the sun, was subject to light rays being bent out of shape in marvelous ways I would never understand. That question led to this observation: how sad it is that an atheist like Christopher Hardwick could watch the sun set or moon rise and never feel a sense of wonder at the mystery behind it.

  Which is probably why God took it so easy on guys like him and Nietzsche. God knew what they were missing, even if they didn’t.

  Then, just as sleep was knitting up my tattered sleeve of care (which is the only phrase of Shakespeare I think I ever memorized) off in the distance, perhaps as far away as the moon itself, I heard an angel singing that French song again in her sad, melancholy voice. I listened to it as long as I could, wishing I could speak its language, dreaming it was a love song being sung to me, about me and for me.

  I went to sleep that night, completely unaware that in three days time, I would hear the song again. Only the next time I heard it, I’d discover it was not a love song at all. It was something else entirely.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Entry #67

  Those who do not feel pain seldom think that it is felt.

  Samuel Johnson

  FRIDAY

  When I woke up the next morning, I was having the most marvelous dream. In it I was having a conversation with Goldberg. He was prattling on about how religion was an opiate and how dangerous it was if it became the only thing in my life. Then right in the middle of this long dissertation about how silly I was to believe everything about Christianity – in walks God. Only he’s not in disguise or dressed in a way to make you comfortable when talking to him. God walked in looking like God. He was twice the size of Goldberg and had long, flowing white hair and beard, with a majestic face that looked like it was carved from granite. In one hand he carried a stone tablet, which at first I thought was t
he Ten Commandments, but then realized no, that was Moses. Anyway, the tablet God was carrying had one word written on it. And that word was “Believe.” God winked at me as he walked to Goldberg’s desk and plopped the tablet down. Goldberg took one look at it and threw up his hands. “Yahweh!” he shouted then sort of collapsed in a heap on the floor.

  That’s when I woke up. And I woke up with the strangest physical sensation – I woke up smiling. I don’t think that has ever happened to me before, but it’s not often that I’d had this type of dream before. One that was so satisfying.

  I showered, grabbed a slice of toast and practically sprinted to the church, without so much as glancing at whatever book was now on display at Rainy Day Books or who might be protesting outside it. When I walked into St. Michael’s, I saw God kneeling at the altar. Instead of taking my normal place in the back row, however, I walked to the altar and stood beside him.

  I say him because God looked up as I approached. He was a young Hispanic man, in his mid-twenties.

  “Buenos dias, Rachel,” he said.

  I asked if it was OK if I joined him.

  He moved slightly to one side.

  “I’d like that,” he answered.

  I kneeled at the altar and bowed my head like I was praying, but nothing came out. Rather than faking it, I looked at the Crucifix instead. Usually when I look at the image of Christ on the cross, I don’t see anything but the cross. This time I saw the man. I know that sounds silly, but I’d never thought of Christ as a man like my husband or father or anyone else. I’d always thought of him as this generic Savior, a divine being who was grand and noble and holy without being real. Not this time. This time, he looked more real than I could ever remember. Then I saw more than the man, I saw the man’s face. I thought about the pain he must have felt in the last hours leading up to and including his crucifixion. What did Christ say as they whipped and kicked and spit on him? How did it feel to have that crown of thorns jammed down on his head? What went though his mind when they pounded those huge metal spikes through his hands and feet?

  One time I accidentally slammed a car door on my thumb. The pain was so awful that I passed out for a few seconds. It was unlike anything I’d ever felt in my life. Trouble was when I regained consciousness I couldn’t get the car door open. Somehow it locked as it was shutting, and I was left standing there with my thumb wedged in tight. Then the blood started pouring out. With each heartbeat, a burning shard of pain raced up my arm and across my chest, and I thought for sure my heart was going to explode. And if my heart didn’t blow up, I was pretty sure my head would. Joe finally got the door open. The whole ordeal lasted maybe sixty seconds, but it was the longest sixty seconds of my life.

  So, I wondered, what would it feel like to have that pain multiplied ten times over, hour after hour after hour? How much agony was Christ in when the tendons in his wrists began to tear beneath the weight of his body; as the nails in his feet ripped through the ligaments and cartilage and muscle? How could he bear pain so great that they created a special word for it: excruciating, which they taught in Catechism means pain that comes “out of the cross.”

  You know the pain must have been horrific when they had to make up a word to describe it.

  Plus, as I stared at his beautiful face, I noticed for the first time that he was dead. Not unconscious but dead. As in not alive. His mind, body and brain had ceased to function. Blood might ooze from the wound in his side, but his heart no longer pumped it.

  Strange but not once in all the years of looking at the Crucifix had I ever thought about the one thing it was designed to make me think about: pain and death. It was almost more than I could bear, but I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I was riveted.

  “Looking at him is overwhelming at times, isn’t it?” God said.

  I told him that it was. Very overwhelming in fact.

  “It’s not a bad thing to feel sorrow when you look at the cross,” God continued. “But don’t allow your sorrow to become a substitute for joy.”

  “A substitute for joy?” I asked.

  God pointed to the cross with his chin.

  “Rachel,” he said, “the Crucifixion is a symbol of life, not death. That’s why I sent him in the first place. To save the world, not condemn it.”

  A symbol of life, not death.

  Again we went back to kneeling in silence. This time however when I bowed my head, the words did come out.

  “Thank you,” was all I said.

  It was only two words but I meant both of them.

  God patted my hand gently.

  “Let’s go to work?” he said. “We’re almost finished, you know.”

  And off we went.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Entry #27

  A poem begins as a lump in the throat.

  Robert Frost

  When we arrived at the worksite, dozens of small shrubs and flowers sat on the ground before us, still in their pots, ready for planting.

  God handed me a shovel.

  “How green is your thumb?” he asked.

  “This is actually something I’m pretty good at,” I said proudly.

  And it was. In fact, one time in grade school I entered a pumpkin-growing contest and won third prize. The trick with growing pumpkins in Georgia is that they didn’t grow all that naturally where we lived, not like peaches, so it was a challenge just to get a seed started. But that didn’t matter to our teacher Mrs. Wyatt. She was determined to celebrate Thanksgiving much the same as the Pilgrims did, and that meant pumpkins, even if the soil wasn’t going to cooperate.

  The secret to my success was fertilizer. As it turns out, fertilizer is the secret to growing almost anything. I piled so much manure on mine you could smell it from down the block. Old Man Martin threw a fit. Just about the time Mom got ready to pull the plug on the whole project, it started growing…and growing… and growing. By the time it was done, I had a gourd the size of a Volkswagen.

  We took it to school in the back of Dad’s pick-up. On the way into the classroom, however, disaster struck: we dropped it! My wonderful pumpkin split right down the middle. I was heartbroken, until Mrs. Wyatt handed me the yellow ribbon.

  “Rachel, sweetheart,” she said. “Yours may not be the biggest today, but I bet it will taste the best.”

  Which was such a nice thing to say that I never forgot it, especially the sweetheart part.

  And she was right. We actually got eight pies out of it, which was some kind of record.

  I asked God if he remembered my pumpkin story.

  “Of course I do,” he laughed. “I’m so glad you got that ribbon, too. It ended up being worth the smell.”

  Boy, I thought to myself, nothing gets past God. Not only did he know about the pumpkin, he recalled the manure as well.

  “What kinds of flowers do we have?” I asked, as I admired all the different colors.

  “Just about everything,” God answered. “Geraniums, daffodils, lilies, roses.”

  “Do you have a favorite?” I asked.

  “I like them all,” he replied. “Although I suppose I’m partial to Lilies of the Valley. They have such lovely faces.”

  I’d never thought of flowers as having faces, but of course the father of those flowers would think that.

  “What about you?” God asked. “Do you have a preference?”

  “Daffodils,” I said without thinking twice. “I like daffodils. Dad used to grow them by the boatload in our back yard.”

  “They’re favorites of mine also,” God said.

  Then without being asked to, he recited a poem so simple yet lovely that it took my breath away.

  I wandered lonely as a cloud

  That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

  When all at once I saw a crowd,

  A host, of golden daffodils;

  Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

  Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

  Continuous as the stars that shine

  And
twinkle on the milky way,

  They stretched in never-ending line

  Along the margin of a bay:

  Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

  Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

  The waves beside them danced, but they

  Out-did the sparkling leaves in glee;

  A poet could not be but gay,

  In such a jocund company!

  I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

  What wealth the show to me had brought:

  For oft, when on my couch I lie

  In vacant or in pensive mood,

  They flash upon that inward eye

  Which is the bliss of solitude;

  And then my heart with pleasure fills,

  And dances with the daffodils.

  When he was finished, all I could say was this:

  “Wordsworth.”

  God nodded. “He had such a nice way with words, didn’t he? A touch light as a feather yet filled with pathos.”

  I wasn’t sure what pathos meant, but whatever it was, if God said Wordsworth had it, I’m sure he did. Plus I’m sure it was something worth having.

  Then, for the first time since we met, we didn’t talk a lot. We worked side by side for several hours. Occasionally God would whistle some tune of Bach’s or I’d hum a few bars from a Beatles song, but other than that we simply enjoyed the sun and wind and each other’s company.

  Yesterday we planted over a hundred trees. Today we placed twice that many flowers and shrubs in the ground between them, equally spaced to give a sense of balance without looking staged. Again, it seemed for every flower or shrub we placed in the ground, three magically appeared. By noon we had a beautiful landscape, mowed to perfection, and populated with a variety of trees, shrubs and flowers. It looked like the back yard of some rich and famous person’s house that you see in magazines. It was gorgeous.

  We stopped to admire our handiwork when God surprised me with a question.

  “Are you hungry?” he said.

  This was the first time we’d talk about food, and of course as soon as we did, I felt starved.

  I told him I was.

  “Then I have the perfect place for lunch,” he said.

  He pointed toward the lake, where, at the water’s edge, sat a huge white umbrella, shading a white table and chairs, on which sat a number of covered dishes, silverware and glasses.

  As we strolled the short distance to lunch, I couldn’t help but marvel at how blue the sky and water appeared, and how the grass was soft, green and plush, and how the reds and yellows and pinks of the flowers were so vibrant they practically glowed. It was like hiking through Disneyworld, only without all the cartoon characters. I pinched myself just to make sure it was real. It hurt like the dickens, so I knew I wasn’t dreaming.

  We sat down at the table. I removed the cover from my plate, expecting maybe an exotic dish of caviar, smoked salmon or maybe even a dish that didn’t exist on earth – I mean, considering who the chef was, anything was possible. When I saw what my Divine Host had prepared, I laughed out loud.

  “Spaghettios!” I said.

  God’s smile was filled with mischief.

  “You were expecting maybe enchiladas?” he said.

  I picked up my fork and dug in.

  “I love Spaghettios.”

  And I really did. I wasn’t just saying that to be polite. I know loving something out of the can sounds sad, and it probably is, but Spaghettios is cheap, easy to make and tastes surprisingly like the real thing. What’s not to love?

  Next to my plate was a glass of water and another that looked like red wine.

  God lifted his wine glass as a toast.

  “Here’s to a long life, a happy life and a productive life,” he said.

  “Are we celebrating something?” I asked.

  “Yes,” God replied. “The end of our project.”

  I was shocked. “You mean we’re done?”

  He motioned toward the lake then back across the expanse of manicured lawn.

  “Don’t you think we’ve done a marvelous job?” he said.

  I told him I did.

  “Actually,” he added, “there’s one small thing we have to do today before we leave today.”

  God looked up at the sky. Clouds rolled in and it started to rain. All in a matter of minutes.

  “We’re not the only ones who get thirsty,” he said with a chuckle.

  We watched the rain fall for a while. It was dry under the umbrella. The spaghetti was excellent. So was the wine.

  “If we’re through with our project,” I said, “what do we do tomorrow?”

  “We’ll come back here,” God replied. “Not to work though. I have something else in mind.”

  “Such as?”

  He paused a moment then answered with a smile.

  “Such as something you’ve never done before.”

  I started to point out, also with a smile, that I’d never done any of this before, but didn’t. God knew it. I didn’t have to elaborate on the obvious.

  Instead we just sat there for the rest of the afternoon.

  Me and God.

  Beneath a white umbrella at the water’s edge, drinking wine, watching the seagulls and talking. We didn’t talk theology. We talked about everyday stuff.

  Why the sky is blue and grass green; why cats purr and dogs don’t; how geese manage to fly all the way from Canada to Mexico every winter and always land in the same lake. I asked him why cows sleep standing up, why men have nipples, and why bears hibernate. All the stuff you know without knowing why. Of course he had answers. All of which made sense, except the one about men’s nipples; that one surprised me a little.

  Finally the rain let up, and wouldn’t you know it, a rainbow appeared on the far horizon, stretching from one side of the lake to the other. It was a beautiful way to end a beautiful afternoon.

  “Well,” God said. “That about does it.”

  He hugged me then, holding me especially close.

  “I want you to go home now, Rachel,” he said. “Get a good night’s sleep. Because tomorrow we’re going to talk about your family.”

  Even though my face was pressed to his chest, my jaw suddenly dropped, just like in the cartoons.

  “You mean…”

  He nodded.

  “Yes,” he said. “We’re going to talk about why your husband and daughter died.”

  I was beyond words but not beyond tears. My eyes suddenly went moist.

  “You’re ready now,” he said softly. “So am I.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  Entry #80

  Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness.

  Lucius Annaeus Seneca

  Without another word, I left God and arrived back at St. Michael’s. As soon as I exited the Confessional I saw Buddy Timmons, sitting almost exactly where he had been a couple nights before. I quietly took a seat in the back row.

  Seeing Buddy this time was different than the first time. The first time I saw him, I wanted to avoid him. This time, I knew there was something growing inside of him that one day would take his life, and my heart began to break.

  Kindness is within your power, even when fondness is not.

  Again, it wasn’t as if I heard someone say those words, but someone spoke them nonetheless. It was my conscience. Except now I knew who my conscience really was, and I knew my conscience was telling me to show kindness to someone I didn’t like all that much. I sat there, maybe a total of three long minutes, knowing I was going to say something to Buddy but wondering how to go about it. How do you nonchalantly start a conversation with someone you bump into on a Friday evening alone in church? Especially if the last time you saw that person they had delivered devastating news without so much as a hint of remorse or regret? I don’t think Buddy enjoyed dismissing me the way he did, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t keeping him up at night either.

  I sat there, trying to devise a clever plan to a
pproach him, when all of a sudden I didn’t have to – Buddy devised one for me.

  “Rachel?” he asked. “Is that you?”

  It was impossible to ignore him and too late to deny it or run, so I confessed that yes I was Rachel and it was in fact me.

  Buddy got up, walked over and plopped down next to me. He didn’t ask what I was doing there. I guess he figured I came to church every Friday evening and sat alone in the back row in the dark. He did ask how I was doing in general, however, which was nice. I told him I’d never been better, which was absolutely true, but I didn’t tell him why. Fortunately he didn’t ask.

  We continued with our small talk for a couple minutes then without warning or invitation, he opened up on me.

  “Rachel,” he said, his voice trembling ever so slightly. “I have cancer.”

  No one said anything for a moment, especially me. We just sat there in the silence with that awful word ringing in both our ears. Then instead of racking my brain for what I should say, I said exactly what I felt.

  “Oh, Buddy, I can’t tell you how sorry I am to hear that.”

  Buddy’s shoulders slumped a little, but he didn’t start bawling, which was a huge relief.

  “The doctors give me a 50/50 chance to beat it,” he said. “But I don’t know, somehow I think those odds are high.”

  Oh, dear, I thought to myself. I didn’t have to wonder if the odds were high. I knew it for a fact. I knew Buddy was going to die. And knowing what he didn’t know was terrible.

  He was very open about the treatment he was facing, and how he hoped he didn’t lose his hair as a result of the chemo.

  “This is probably no great secret,” he said, “but I’m balding a little on top.”

  I told him I hadn’t noticed.

  “I guess, if worse comes to worse,” he said. “I could get a toupee.”

  I told him I thought he’d look good with or without hair. He smiled and seemed to genuinely appreciate the compliment. I don’t think he received them very often.

  Suddenly I felt good. Or maybe a better word is useful. Or maybe both. I felt good because when Buddy told me how awful he felt, I actually felt awful right along with him. I didn’t have to fake it, like I had done so often in my life. And useful because somehow, in the sanctuary darkness of St. Michael’s that evening, I was able to bring a small measure of comfort to someone who was going through a tough time.

  Kindness is within your power, even when fondness is not.

  Buddy and I talked for maybe thirty minutes, and not once did I stray from one eye to the other or so much as glance at his hair. I stayed focused on him. His pain. His grief. His story. Which was actually sadder than I thought it might be, and in a way, made me think that my tragic circumstances were not so tragic after all.

  Also it was OK that we talk about his life because I found that I was more interested in him than me.

  Toward the end of our conversation, Buddy admitted the one thing most people today have a tough time admitting.

  “Rachel,” he said, “I don’t have many friends. Close friends, that is, and well, tonight you treated me like one. Thank you.”

  While talking to Buddy, I half-expected him to get teary-eyed on me, but when he told me he didn’t have any friends, I was the one who broke down. He whipped out a handkerchief, which normally I don’t use if it’s someone else’s, but this time I did. It was a very kind gesture. When I was finished with it, I stuck it in my back pocket, assuring him that I would launder and return it.

  Then I told Buddy something that surprised me more than him.

  “Call me,” I said. “If you ever need to, you know, talk.”

  He said he would.

  Before we parted company, Buddy hugged me. He didn’t say anything. He just wrapped his arms around me and squeezed me tight. Almost as tight as I had squeezed God earlier in the day.

  Of course hugging a guy like Buddy was not the same as hugging a guy like God. But it was surprisingly close. Closer than I thought it would be.

  Suddenly I felt better. Better about Buddy. Better about me.

  Funny how kindness works both ways.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Entry #33

  The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

  Oscar Wilde

  I checked my messages when I got home. There were none. I rummaged through my kitchen cabinets and came up with dinner: soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. As I pulled my sandwich off the griddle, I thought for a moment I saw a man’s image on one slice – Jesus perhaps? – but it was a false alarm. Turns out it was a cheese bubble that soon popped. Briefly catching the glimpse of God in a dairy product, however, made me wonder why anyone would spend $1,000 for one that was sold recently on e-Bay. An article in the paper said it was a sign of how desperate people are when it comes to miracles. I think it’s more a sign of how gullible people are when it comes to cheese sandwiches. I saw a photograph of the infamous piece of bread. To my untrained eye it looked less like Jesus and more like a clay sculpture I once made of my Uncle Remy, complete with misshapen eyes and a longer-than-normal chin. Why anyone would call a hunk of bread and some Velveeta a miracle was beyond me. Then again, I didn’t have to go out in search of a miracle; one had found me instead.

  After dinner, I poured myself some chocolate milk and climbed into my chair to think. A lot of interesting things had happened today, but all I could think about was what was going to happen tomorrow.

  Tomorrow God and I were going to talk about the one thing I could hardly bring myself to talk about: why my husband and daughter died. At long last, I was going to hear the truth. But now that the time was near, I wondered if I could handle the truth. On the outside I convinced myself I wanted the facts, but on the inside I think I wanted something else: I think I wanted comfort more than truth. Comfort in knowing that when terrible things happen to fairly decent people, there’s a reason for it. But what if the truth hurt more than death itself? What if there was no reason? Or what if the reason my loved ones were getting picked off one at a time was because of something I did? Or didn’t do? Then what?

  Strange how much you think you want something until you almost get it, then getting it is suddenly the last thing you want.

  It’s like that time I stood in line for a couple hours when I was a kid, waiting to sit on Santa Claus’ lap. I was so excited I couldn’t stand still. But when my turn finally came and the jolly old elf beckoned me to his chair, I panicked. I turned and ran like the wind. I just couldn’t do it.

  I told myself that tomorrow was going to be different. It had to be.

  It was almost eleven p.m. when I finally called it a night. I’m not big on tradition, but it had become something of a tradition for me to open my Bible at random and see what turned up. What turned up were these words spoken by Jesus from a book called John:

  For you are truly my disciples if you keep obeying my teachings. And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

  The truth will set you free.

  So, there it was; the answer to my question about handling the truth. Although I wasn’t sure what I’d be free of, I had to assume it was better than not being free. Maybe it meant that tomorrow God’s truth would deliver both the facts and comfort, rolled up in one.

  Now, wouldn’t that be a neat trick?

  I turned out the lights and just before I drifted off, the soothing music of my French lullaby wafted through the window and into my head. It was my Faraway Angel, lulling me to sleep with her sweet voice and infinitely sad, sad melody. My last conscious thoughts were that of the cross, daffodils, and a man named Buddy, who was now my friend.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Entry #88

  I believe Satan exists for two reasons: one, the Bible says so; and two, I have done business with him.

  D.L Moody

  SATURDAY

  Saturday mornings have always been special for me. It’s probably a leftover memory from when I was in grade s
chool, and you knew when you woke up all you had to do was watch cartoons, play with friends and talk on the phone. No school. No homework. Just free time. I had no aches or pains then, and life was fun.

  When I woke up Saturday morning, I felt that same sense of freedom and anticipation that comes with the weekend. I showered, got dressed and grabbed a Pop-Tart on the way out the door. Twenty minutes later, I walked into the sanctuary at St. Michael’s.

  God was not in his regular place up front at the altar, so I poked my head in the Confessional.

  “Hello?” I said.

  No answer.

  It then occurred to me that I didn’t know what to call God. Should I call him God or Father or Yahweh, like Goldberg did in my dream? Father seemed right, even though for a Catholic, Father meant someone else entirely, but in this case, seemed appropriate.

  “Hello, Father? Anybody home?”

  Nothing.

  I’d never thought to ask God what he did during his time off. Or for that matter, if he took any time off. Maybe he got tied up at another meeting, and was running a little late. I decided whatever the reason, it was probably a good one. I took a seat in the back row and waited.

  A couple minutes passed when a door at the back of church opened. A priest entered the sanctuary. He walked toward the altar, laid a Bible on it then headed back the way he’d entered.

  For the past five days I’d come to St. Michael’s without seeing anyone but God and Timmons. It never occurred to me to come up with a plan on what to say if I did bump into somebody. Luckily, the priest didn’t see me sitting in the shadows, so I didn’t panic.

  Until he stopped, turned and looked in my general direction.

  “Hello?” he said. “Is someone there?”

  Oh, my goodness, I thought, what do I do? If I say nothing, that will arouse suspicion. If I say anything, that will invite conversation. It was lose-lose situation.

  “Hello?” he said again, this time stepping toward me.

  I opted for conversation.

  “Good morning,” I said. “I hope I’m not intruding.”

  Now that he located my voice, he located me.

  “Not at all,” he said as he walked in my direction. “You’re always welcome in God’s house.”

  As he soon as he said it, I recognized the phrase. A moment later, I recognized the man. It was the priest I’d met the time I came in looking for a bathroom.

  He stopped in front of me, wearing that same deep tan and wonderful smile.

  “Welcome back to St. Michael’s,” he said. “I wondered if I might see you again.”

  “Father,” I said, “you have a very good memory.”

  He laughed. “Apparently you didn’t hear me deliver last week’s sermon. I misread my notes and told the congregation not to let worry kill them – let the church help. It got quite a laugh.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh, also.

  He shrugged with a smile. “The perils of public speaking, I guess. Are you here to light another candle for your father?”

  I had no clue what he meant then realized that was the reason I used for being in the church the first time I saw him.

  “No,” I said. “I just dropped in for a few minutes, you know, to genuflect.”

  Why in the world I would use a word like genuflect was beyond me. I wasn’t even sure what it meant. But the priest seemed to know. He nodded with understanding.

  We looked at one another a moment, and even though I didn’t know him, I liked him. He seemed somehow genuine, someone I could learn to trust. I decided that maybe when all this business with God was over that I’d come back to St. Michael’s. Perhaps make it my church home.

  “Well, I’ll leave you to your thoughts,” he said as he turned to leave. “Good to see you again.”

  After taking a half-dozen steps however he turned back.

  “May I ask you a question?” he said.

  “Certainly.”

  “Is there anything St. Michael’s can do for you?”

  This was not the question I was expecting.

  “I’m not sure what you mean.” I said.

  He came back and sat in the pew in front of me.

  “Well, I’ve noticed that you’ve come in each morning for quite a while now, and, well, I just wondered if there was anything that I, or St. Michael’s, can do for you?”

  I was startled. “You’ve seen me at St. Michael’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “This week?”

  “Almost every morning.”

  I tried to calm myself.

  I said, “I don’t recall seeing you.”

  Again that smile. “The church is a place of solitude for prayer and reflection. As a priest I try not to intrude.”

  Which made sense, so I relaxed a little.

  “Thank you for asking,” I said. “But, no, there’s nothing you can do for me. I’ll just genuflect a while longer then be on my way.”

  He nodded but didn’t get up to leave as I hoped he would.

  “May I ask another question then?” he said.

  The muscles in my neck tightened.

  “Are you in need of assistance?” he asked. “A warm meal? Or a room for the night perhaps?

  Now I was both startled and puzzled.

  “Father,” I said. “Why would you ask such a thing?”

  His brown furrowed. His smile faded. He was having a hard time answering. Finally he did.

  “Because each morning when you come in,” he said. “You sit here for a short while and then, well, then you fall asleep.”

  He pointed to the pew I was sitting in.

  “You fall asleep right here in fact. I’ve considered waking you, but something told me you might need the rest.”

  My stomach suddenly dropped.

  “I’ve been sleeping in this pew?” I asked, my voice betraying the black sense of dread rising inside me. “Every morning?”

  He nodded. “Yes. Please, I don’t mean to meddle in your affairs, but if you need assistance, food or clothing or, as I mentioned, a room for the night, we have an excellent shelter in the area. I’d be glad to drive you there.”

  Suddenly I could no longer hear a word being said. I know the handsome priest with the great smile was still talking because I could see his lips moving, but the sound of the ocean roaring inside my head drowned out everything else.

  I’ve been sleeping…every morning, of everyday, for the entire week! Sleeping…in this very pew...alone…all day. Oh no…no, no, no – it was a dream! Ohdearlord –my week with God was all just a dream!

  THIRTY-NINE

  Entry #29

  No one loses Faith except by throwing it away.

  Augustine

  I’m not sure how long the priest sat there or when he finally gave up and left. All I know is that the sounds of the ocean finally subsided and I was all alone. Alone and more miserable than I’ve ever been in my entire life.

  I tried to stand but my legs wouldn’t hold me. They were made of rubber. I was made of rubber. My head began to spin. Little black dots floated everywhere. I looked toward the altar and saw three Crucifixes where there should only be one, and knew I was a goner. I was passing out. Just before I keeled over though, someone sat down next to me.

  “Good morning, Rachel,” God said. “Did you sleep well?”

  It’s not very often that I experience three emotions simultaneously. I was stunned, thrilled and perplexed, all that the same time, with a double emphasis on perplexed.

  “Is that you?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s me.”

  And it was God. Only this time she was blond-haired, blue-eyed and around the age of thirty. She looked very Norwegian.

  Eventually the little black dots vanished and I regained my bearings. I told God what had happened. Everything. All the way down to the priest telling me the funny story about having the church help kill you.

  God placed her hand on mine.

  “Rachel,” she said. “I k
now all about the priest.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes. I knew what he was doing,” she said. “I also knew how you would react. But I allowed him to talk to you so that you could experience his power first-hand.”

  “But why would a priest – ”

  A chill suddenly raced down my spine.

  I looked at God in shock.

  “He wasn’t a priest, was he?” I said.

  God shook her head. “No. But you were never in any danger. I keep a close eye on him.”

  I couldn’t believe it.

  “So that was him?” I said, my voice trembling. “That was Satan?”

  “Yes.”

  “And everything he told me was a lie?”

  “It’s what he does,” she said. “He is the Father of all Lies. Lies that create doubt, and doubt is a powerful weapon.”

  “But he was so charming,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “And believable.”

  God nodded.

  “That’s what makes him dangerous. Two minutes with him made you doubt everything you learned in five days with me. That is power in its purest form, and he knows how to use it effectively.”

  God hugged me.

  “I’m sorry you had to go through that, Rachel. But now you know what he’s like, and you know how he behaves. The next time he appears, you’ll recognize him.”

  The same chill went down my spine as before.

  “You mean I’ll see him again?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “When you least expect it.”

  We sat in silence for a moment as my legs and body returned to normal.

  Finally God asked if I was ready to go.

  I told her yes and closed my eyes. I was never more ready to go anywhere in my entire life.

   

  FORTY

  Entry #83

  Here bring your wounded hearts, here tell your anguish; Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal.

  Thomas More

  When I opened my eyes God and I were at the worksite, sitting together under a large white canopy in an old-fashioned wooden swing. We were facing the lake. Lemonade and cookies sat on the table next to us.

  “I’ve always liked swings,” God said. “I seem to think better when I’m in one.”

  I told God we had a swing on the back porch of my parent’s house. In the summer, Dad, Steve and I would sit there for hours on end, listening to the Atlanta Braves play baseball on the radio. It was wonderful.

  God smiled. “Your mother still goes out there some nights and sits in that swing. She feels closest to your father when she’s back there, with his flowers and that birdhouse he enjoyed so much.”

  I was surprised by that.

  “Mom misses Dad?” I said.

  “Very much,” God replied. “She thinks about him daily.”

  I would never have guess that in a million years.

  “I called her,” I said.

  God nodded. “I know. She wanted to pick up the phone but didn’t have the strength. Give her time. And keep calling.”

  I sipped the lemonade. It was good. Not too sour or too sweet.

  Then, slowly, quietly, without fanfare or applause, God started the conversation that would change my life forever.

  “I was with your husband the day of the accident,” she said.

  A lump formed in my throat.

  “He was in very high spirits,” she continued. “In fact, he was whistling a Bruce Springsteen song.”

  If I hadn’t been so close to crying, I would have laughed.

  “He loved Bruce,” I said. “I think he knew every song by heart.”

  “The driver of the other vehicle lost consciousness,” God said. “He crossed the center-line and hit your husband’s car head-on. It happened very quickly. There was nothing he could do.”

  I tried hard not to see the events God was describing, but it was no use – in my mind’s eye, I saw them with perfect clarity.

  “They said Joe died instantly,” I said. “Is that true?”

  She nodded slowly. “Yes. He was never in any pain. The very second of the collision, however, his last thought was of you. He knew you were making chili. He was anxious to get home for dinner.”

  The lump in my throat grew smaller.

  “I was there at your brother’s accident,” God said. “As he fell, he realized it was his fault. He never should have grabbed your wrist.”

  The lump continued to shrink.

  “And I was with you in the hospital when Teresa died. There was never any discomfort or pain for her, either. She went peacefully.”

  I thought the moment God mentioned Teresa’s name, I’d lose it. But I didn’t. Oddly, I became even calmer.

  The lump disappeared all together.

  “Will I get to see them again?” I asked. “In Heaven?”

  “Yes.”

  “What will it be like?”

  “What’s the fondest memory you have of your husband?” God asked.

  I didn’t have to think long. It wasn’t our wedding, honeymoon or something big and dramatic. It was something small.

  “Lying in a hammock,” I said. “In my parent’s backyard. We were reading. It was, I don’t know, just sweet and comfortable, resting my head on his chest.”

  “You were happy then?” God asked. “Content?”

  “Very much so.”

  “Then you will re-live that moment with him.”

  “Really? How often?”

  “As often as you like.”

  “And my brother?”

  “You will sit with him in that swing as often as you like.”

  “And Teresa?”

  God smiled gently. “You will be with her again…as often as you like.”

  I didn’t know if I was ready for the answer but I knew I had to ask the question.

  “So why did it happen?” I said. “Why did they have to die?”

  It was a good long while before God spoke. We both knew this was the reason she chose to spend time with me. This was the moment of truth.

  “They didn’t have to die,” she said quietly. “In fact, their deaths were not according to my Will.”

  It was slow in coming but the impact of those words hit me with the force of a two-by-four.

  I said with surprise, “You mean there’s a Will in the universe that’s greater than yours?”

  God shook her head. “No, my Will is supreme.”

  “But if your Will is supreme,” I said, “And their deaths were against your Will, then, I guess I’m back to my original question. Why did they have to die? I mean, isn’t there a plan of some sort?”

  “Yes,” God replied. “There’s a plan. But my plans differ from yours. The plan you’re referring to is presumptive. You presume I orchestrate every word you speak, every thought you think, every action you take, and that I do so with a specific purpose in mind.”

  “Are you saying there’s no purpose to life?”

  God shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not saying that at all. Life has an enormous purpose. I just don’t force you to fulfill it, that’s all. My Will is permissive, not dictatorial.”

  The look on my face was, I’m sure, one of confusion.

  “Rachel,” she said. “Love has no real value unless it is given freely. When I created you, I could have required that you love me, but that wouldn’t be love, that would be coercion. Likewise, when I created you, I could have arranged it so that every decision you make, every action you take, every thought you think, would have been done in a loving manner. But that wouldn’t be love either. That would be servitude.”

  The confusion was beginning to clear up a little. But just a little.

  “That’s why I gave you freedom of choice,” God continued. “Freedom to love me or not to love me. Freedom to choose to do right or to do wrong. The man who caused your husband’s death simply chose to do wrong. It was not my Will that he do it
, but it was my Will that made it possible.”

  I thought about that a couple moments but didn’t speak immediately. I wanted to make sure I had it straight.

  Finally, I said, “So, Joe’s accident was the result of free will. The free will of a man who chose to drink and drive.”

  God nodded yes.

  I thought carefully for a moment.

  “But what about Teresa?” I asked. “How was her death an act of free will?”

  “It’s wasn’t,” God replied. “What happened to your daughter happened for a different reason.”

  My stomach dropped a little. It does that when I think bad news is on the way.

  “I didn’t create a perfect world,” God said. “I created the earth. Otherwise it would just be another Heaven. Likewise, I didn’t create perfect creatures, I created human beings. Otherwise you would be angels.”

  “I have no idea what that means,” I said.

  God paused, placed her fingers against her lips and tapped lightly, thinking. After a moment she spoke.

  “Angels have perfect bodies, Rachel. Humans do not. Humans have imperfections. Some of those imperfections, like Teresa’s, are biological flaws that result in death before birth. These flaws, however, are what make you human. These flaws separate you from the angels. And it is these same flaws that allow me to love you as my created children.”

  My head was spinning from all the cosmic logic being thrown at me. I got most of it, but some of it was a little gray. Trouble was I was tired of gray. I wanted black and white.

  “So what does all this mean?” I asked.

  God took my hand in hers.

  “What all this means,” she said, “is that the deaths of your loved ones were not the result of a plan. Nor an act of punishment or retribution. Their deaths were the consequence of living a life on earth. A life that breaks my heart sometimes, the same as it breaks yours.”

  So there it was.

  The reason bad things happen to good people.

  They happen as a result of either free will or luck-of-the-draw. God wasn’t punishing anyone. She wasn’t trying to get our attention or teach us a lesson or get us to straighten up and fly right. She was simply allowing an imperfect world with its imperfect people to go about its imperfect way.

  And it was all done out of love.

  A divine love for less-than-divine creatures.

  We sat in the gathering silence for a while after that. God held my hand gently, not tightly. It was almost like we were girlfriends rather than Creature and Creator. After a couple minutes she made an odd request.

  “May I borrow your notebook?” she said.

  I handed it over. She wrote something down and handed it back. I looked at what she’d written. It was a Bible verse.

  “Now,” God said. “I’d like to take you someplace. Someplace that will help you understand everything I’ve told you today.”

  I closed my eyes without asking our destination. When I opened them, I knew immediately where we were. It was my parent’s back yard. There was the same fence Echo dug a hole under and Dad’s birdhouse and a boatload of daffodils and the spot where a giant pumpkin once grew. Seeing all these familiar things made me suddenly homesick. But it was who I saw at the far side of the yard that made my knees buckle.

  I saw my husband.

  FORTY-ONE

  Entry #61

  Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.

  Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

  “Is that…?” I asked.

  God nodded. “Yes, that’s Joe.”

  I couldn’t breathe. I clutched my stomach and leaned forward to force the blood back into my head.

  “But, for now,” God said, “he can neither see nor hear you. I’m sorry.”

  Finally, I straightened up.

  “Can I get closer?”

  “Certainly,” she answered. “Walk as close as you like.”

  I slowly crossed the yard, afraid if I approached my husband too quickly he might disappear or turn into somebody else. But he didn’t. He remained as familiar and handsome as ever. He was reading a book, just like I remembered. My heart pounded louder with each step. I so wanted to reach out and touch him, to place my hand on his cheek, my head on his chest, just to feel the warmth of his body, the caress of his hand. Just one more time.

  “Is this Heaven?” I whispered.

  “Yes,” God replied. “A very small portion of it.”

  “You mean there’s more?”

  She motioned toward the house.

  There, on the back porch, sitting in a wooden swing, sipping a soda, was my brother. Echo lay at his feet. A baseball game played on the radio next to him.

  God took my hand in hers.

  “I thought it important that you see them,” she said. “I wanted you to know beyond any doubt that you will be with them again someday, here, just like this.”

  “When?” I asked.

  She smiled, almost with a hint of sadness, but not quite.

  “When the time comes,” she said softly.

  I turned back to my husband. He was smiling as he read. I glanced at the title. It was a book by Kurt Vonnegut. The one with Montana Wildhack in it. I watched him silently for a few minutes, wondering if he wondered about me. If he wished I was in the swing with him.

  “Does he ever think about me?” I asked.

  “Yes,” God said. “In fact, he’s thinking of you right now.”

  I turned to my brother.

  “And Steve?”

  “Yes, he misses you, too,” God said. “Love is not diminished by death, Rachel. Love is eternal.”

  We stood together a moment, God and I. Neither of us spoke. There was so much to say but no way to say it. Finally she asked if I was ready to go.

  “No,” I said. “But I will anyway.”

  And with that, we left Heaven, arriving once again back at the worksite.

  “Tomorrow is Sunday,” God said. “It will be our last day together.”

  I nodded but didn’t say anything. My mind was still in the back yard of the house I grew up in, which had now become something far, far better.

  “I don’t know if anything I’ve told or shown you today have helped,” she said. “I hope so. I hope that life will become easier for you now.”

  I told her it was easier already.

  Her Norwegian eyes brightened.

  “Tomorrow,” she said, “is going to be special. A day unlike any you’ve ever experienced.”

  We hugged, and instantly I returned to St. Michael’s. The church was dark and cool and silent, a place of absolute peace. I sat in the sacred stillness for a long while, lost in the experience of the last half-hour.

  The walk home was without sight or sound. I’m sure there was the usual traffic and people and general hustle bustle of an Oak Park afternoon, but I neither saw nor heard any of it. I was still far away in a place called Heaven, or better yet, a little bit of Heaven was now inside of me.

  FORTY-TWO

  Entry #49

  My mind is not like a bed that has to be made and remade; there are some things of which I am absolutely certain.

  James Agate

  I checked my messages when I got home. There were none. I picked up the phone and dialed my mom. I got her voice-mail.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said. “Just checking in. Give me a call when you get a chance. Oh, and Mom, I love you.”

  Even if she couldn’t bring herself to answer the phone, I wanted her to know I loved her. And I did love her. So much so that it surprised me.

  After dinner, I poured a half-glass of chocolate milk and slid into my chair to think.

  Of all the marvelous things God had shown me and told me and did with me over the past six days, they all paled by comparison to the eight minutes I spent in heaven. To see my husband, brother and father again, well, that was beyond words.

  Until today I feared death. I’m told most people do, or at least that’s what Goldberg claimed. He said it’s a fear of the gre
at unknown, which for me is partly true and partly false. True in the sense that I’m not crazy about going somewhere I haven’t been before and doing unfamiliar things with people I don’t know. That much is not at all attractive. What is attractive about death, however, is knowing that it is not the end of anything, it’s really the beginning.

  But I think there’s another reason people fear death. A reason few of us admit to ourselves much less share with people like therapists, priests or even our own families. I think we fear death because we figure no matter where we end up going, it can’t be better than what we have now here on earth. All the talk about harps and singing and sharing time with God sounds fine on the surface, but when it really comes down to crunch time and the Grim Reaper is standing in the door, that’s when people start clawing at the furniture, trying to grab onto something so they won’t have to go. It’s not so much the fear of doing things we don’t know as it is fear of losing the things we do.

  As of today, however, I was past all that. The thought of an afterlife didn’t just merely appeal to me, it beckoned to me in the strongest sense. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know how I’m going to spend eternity, and I got to tell you, I’m happy as a clam. I don’t just accept my fate, I embrace it.

  Suddenly I remembered my notebook. I opened it up and flipped to the last page. Written there in bold black script was this: 1 Corinthians 15: 51-55.

  I grabbed my Bible. It took me a couple minutes to land on the right page, but when I did, this is what I read:

  Behold, I will tell you a secret! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the sound of the last trumpet. And the dead will be raised imperishable, and this mortal body will put on immortality. Then the saying that is written will be fulfilled: Where, O death is your victory? Where, O Death is your sting?

  Indeed, I asked myself. Where is his sting?

  Thanks to what I’d seen today, I no longer thought of death as a tall, black-hooded, stoop-shoulder guy with a scythe and lantern. I now thought of him as a friendly conductor on a train, taking my ticket when I boarded and making sure I was comfortable for the ride to my parent’s house. When you think of dying that way, all the fear and mystery is removed.

  So, in answer to my question: why did my loved ones have to die? I now know they didn’t have to. It was tough getting that concept straight in my mind, but what it boiled down to was this: God doesn’t orchestrate events; she sets them in motion and they orchestrate themselves. Some turn out OK the first time around and some don’t. But the ones that turn out bad are either our fault through an act of free will or no one’s fault through an instance of misfortune. God doesn’t create tragedies to make a point. She allows them to happen because, in a world worth loving, tragic things happen.

  I turned out the lights then. Before I went to sleep though, I said a prayer. I thanked God for three things: one, being there for me when I needed her; two, for not forcing me to obey her without first understanding her. And most of all, three, for explaining that when our hearts are broken, so is hers.

  There’s comfort in a shared grief.

  Comfort indeed.

  FORTY-THREE

  Entry #50

  Don’t be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much of life. Aim above morality. Don’t just be good; be good for something.

  Henry David Thoreau

  SUNDAY

  I was up early the next morning, ate breakfast and was out the door within the hour. When I reached St. Michael’s I noticed a sign outside announcing the upcoming sermon: “A Step of Faith.” When I walked into the sanctuary, I was shocked. It was full of people. I took a seat in the back row, wondering if this was a regular church service or if maybe God planned on taking us all to the lake this morning. A moment later a priest appeared at the altar.

  “Welcome to the eight a.m. Mass at St. Michael’s,” he said.

  I looked at him long and hard, just to make sure he was the genuine article, and not you-know-who in disguise. He said his name was Father Hamilton, but I wasn’t going to be suckered in by a fake name.

  It wasn’t until I saw God sitting in the back row that I relaxed. I knew it was God because he looked just like my uncle again. Plus he motioned for me to sit next to him. And so I did.

  After a couple songs and a prayer, Father Hamilton launched into his sermon.

  “Throughout the Bible,” he said, “there is one important truth illustrated time and again: the Holy Spirit releases his power the moment we take a step of faith.”

  Father Hamilton had a great voice. Warm and sincere. The kind of voice you could listen to a long time without getting bored or distracted.

  “A great example of this truth,” he continued, “is contained in the book of Joshua. When Joshua was preparing to lead the Hebrews into the Promised Land, he was met by the floodwaters of the Jordan River.” Father Hamilton read directly from the Bible. “And this is what God told him: When you reach the banks of the river, take a few steps into the water and stop.”

  Father Hamilton’s eyes swept the entire congregation, but every so often it seemed like he lingered on me a little longer than the others. I wrote it off as my imagination. I oftentimes think people are staring at me when they’re probably not.

  “And,” Father Hamilton continued, his voice rising with emotion, “when Joshua took that first step of faith, the floodwaters of the Jordan River receded, and the Hebrews went on to claim the land that has today become the nation of Israel.”

  I thought this an interesting story. Usually I’m either bored or distracted during a sermon, but not this time. This time I was clued in to what was being said, in part because I was interested, and in part because I couldn’t get over the feeling that what was being preached was being done for my benefit.

  “There are people in this world,” Father Hamilton said, “whose mission it seems is to tell others what cannot be done. They are the critics. You’ll notice they are typically vocal in their criticism yet exempt from action. But, my friends, as a great leader of this nation once said, ‘It is not the critic who counts. Not the one who points out how the strong person stumbles, or how the doer of deeds might have done it better. The credit belongs to the man or woman who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with sweat and dust and tears. Who strives valiantly. Who errs and comes up short again and again and again. Who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends themselves in a worthy cause. Who, if they fail, at least they fail while daring greatly, so that their place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”’

  Father Hamilton had my complete attention, even though

  doing great deeds had very little to do with me as I had my hands full just keeping up with my laundry.

  A few minutes later, the church service ended and everyone

  politely filed out, shaking hands with one another, chatting happily about the latest baseball scores and what their kids were up to these days.

  I sat there quietly, hoping no one would say anything to me, and it worked because no one did. When the sanctuary was empty, God spoke quietly.

  “That was a nice sermon,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

  I told him I thought it was very nice.

  He glanced at me, his blue eyes twinkling in the dim sanctuary light.

  “Especially the part about spending yourself in a worthy cause,” he said. “I liked that quite a bit. Very appropriate these days.”

  I got the feeling God was up to something, but I was afraid to ask because I was pretty sure that something involved me.

  “Are we returning to the lake today?” I asked.

  “Yes,” God replied. “But there’s someplace else I’d like to visit before we do. If that’s all right?”

  “Heaven again?” I asked hopefully.

  He shook his head.

  “No, someplace else. But someplace special.”

  I closed my eye
s, and, as before, felt a slight breeze against my cheek. Before I actually saw our destination, however, I smelled it: the pungent aroma of smoke and diesel fuel and burning rubber.

  I opened my eyes. Instead of the manicured lawn we’d left the day before, God and I were standing on the side of a busy highway. Except right in the middle of the highway, where cars should be zipping along, was an ambulance and a fire truck and a couple cop cars, all with their lights flashing, red, white and blue. Next to the fire truck was a twisted heap of metal, which I finally figured out was half of a car, the front half. About twenty yards away, lying upside down in a ditch, was the other half. It had been completely severed just behind the driver’s seat. Fifty yards down the road was a mangled eighteen-wheeler which had done the severing.

  A number of men and women in uniform milled around the broken glass and hunks of smoldering metal, talking in hushed, serious tones. They were not in a hurry. Apparently all the damage that could be done had been done.

  “Don’t’ worry,” God said. “No one can see us.”

  I wasn’t worried about being seen; I was more worried about what I might see. It was obvious we were at the scene of a horrific accident, and I was fairly sure that where there’s wreckage, there’s carnage.

  Suddenly a young woman, about my age, came sprinting up the side of the road, a look of disbelief mixed with terror on her face. She yelled a man’s name over and over and over. A female cop stepped in her path and stopped her. They talked briefly before the woman abruptly dropped to her knees and started crying almost as hard as I had the day my Teresa died.

  “She knew someone in the accident, didn’t she?” I said.

  God nodded. “Her husband.”

  “Is he…” I couldn’t bring myself to finish the question.

  Again the nod.

  As I stood there, transfixed by the utter horror of what lay before me, the smoke and wreckage and sobbing widow simply melted away, like watercolors left out in the rain.

  Now I was standing in a graveyard, surrounded by tombstones and umbrellas and people dressed all in black. It was raining. In front of us was a small gray tent, under which sat a dozen or so people, all facing a casket that was slowly being lowered into the ground.

  A man and woman about my parent’s age sat in the front row of chairs. They leaned on each other for support. Next to them was a young girl, with red and swollen eyes. She was crying. They were all crying.

  “Whose funeral is this?” I asked.

  “No one you know,” God replied. “He was, however, someone’s brother, someone’s son and someone’s friend.”

  Then, just as before, the graveyard slowly dissolved, and I was standing in a small nursery whose walls were painted yellow and blue. Stuffed animals lined the window sill. An empty crib sat in one corner. A young woman stood in the doorway, arms crossed, a faraway look in her eye, staring at the crib without moving. I recognized the expression on her face. It was the look of someone whose heart has been crushed.

  “She lost her child, didn’t she?” I asked.

  “Yes,” God said. “A son.”

  An immense sadness welled up in me. I felt sorrow for the woman in the doorway who lost her child and the girl at the cemetery who lost her brother and the woman on the highway who lost her husband. I knew exactly how they felt. I knew exactly how the slow, dull ache would start in the stomach, work its way up to the throat, then scratch and claw its way into the brain. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing they could do or say or think that would bring back the ones they’d lost. It was a nightmare from which they were never going to awaken. It was inconsolable. It was horrible. And I hated that they had to go through what I’d gone through. I absolutely hated it.

  “Why did you bring me here?” I asked God.

  He took my hand in his. “Let’s discuss that back at the lake, shall we?”

  I closed my eyes, and together we left

  FORTY-FOUR

  Entry #14

  A person often meets their destiny on the road they took to avoid it.

  Jean de La Fonatine

  We arrived back at the worksite, but it was not the same place we’d left on Saturday. I mean, it was the same place, but instead of an open field with miniature trees and shrubs and flowers, it was now a full-blown park, with trees tall as telephone poles and magnificent green shrubs and flowers of every color in the rainbow. The grass was smooth and rolled like a carpet down to the edge of the most beautiful lake I’d ever seen, which now was about ten times larger than it had been yesterday.

  “Oh, my,” was the first thing I said. “This is...this is….”

  “Beautiful?” God asked.

  All I could do was nod.

  “It is nice, isn’t it,” he said. “We do good work together, you and me.”

  As I looked around, I felt there was something familiar about this place. Not because I’d spent the last week here, however; it was something else. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but it felt as if I’d seen it in a movie or a poster or a….

  Then it hit me.

  “This is that painting!” I exclaimed. “The one hanging in Goldberg’s office. The one on my refrigerator! Sunday in the Park with George.”

  God smiled. “I’ve always admired that painting,” he said. “Except now you might say it’s Sunday in the Park with God.”

  As much as I loved how the park had changed, my mind was still cluttered with the images of cars split in half and women dressed in black and a baby crib that held no baby.

  So again I asked.

  “Why did you take me to those places? Why did you show me those people?”

  God motioned toward a blanket that was spread on the ground.

  “Please,” he said. “Sit with me for a few minutes.”

  We both sat down.

  “Before I explain,” God said. “I want you to tell me something. When we first met, there was a question you wrote in your notebook but never asked. I believe it had to do with the Vatican.”

  I repeated the story.

  “When I was ten years old,” I said. “Our family was on vacation in Rome, and we bumped into this priest at St. Peter’s, who singled me out. He said, ‘Rachel, God is with you.’ And well, I don’t know. I was just...well, I kind of wondered…” My voice trailed off.

  God smiled. “Yes, go on.”

  “Well, I’ve always wondered if that particular priest picked kids out of the crowd all the time, or did he see something in me that was special?”

  God looked at me a good long while, then said the one thing I wasn’t expecting him to.

  “He saw something in you, Rachel. In fact, it’s the same thing I see in you.”

  I wasn’t expecting God to say that because I’d never really thought there was anything in me except what you saw on the surface.

  “The priest wasn’t sure what it was,” God continued. “But he was certain of this: he was looking at a Child of Destiny.”

  I thought the words Child of Destiny was such a lovely phrase until I realized I was the child in question, and it was my destiny we were talking about.

  I asked God if somehow my destiny was connected to those people we’d just seen.

  He nodded.

  “There are two great days in a person’s life,” he said. “The day you are born and the day you discover why. What I’d like to share with you now is why I created you. I want to share with you your purpose in life.”

  Until I met God, my purpose in life was simply to make it through another day.

  But that was then and this was now.

  “The most important thing in life is love,” God continued. “To love your neighbor as yourself. And because of that love, each person on earth is meant to perform certain tasks of charity. Some are very small tasks, and might only involve one person. Others, however, are meant to influence a much larger group. Hundreds, perhaps even thousands.”

  My pulse jumped a couple notches.

  “Which one a
m I?” I asked.

  I expected God to say ‘Well, that depends,’ then give me an easy way out.

  I was wrong.

  “Thousands,” he said. “Perhaps tens of thousands.”

  To say I was stunned would be an understatement. In fact, it is an understatement. I was flummoxed. Which is a much stronger and better word.

  How, in heavens name, could I influence thousands of people when the only person I had influence over was me; and sometimes even that wasn’t a sure bet.

  “Are you sure it’s me you’re talking about?” I said.

  God laughed. “I’m positive. I’m a pretty good judge of character.”

  It wasn’t my character I doubted, it was my ability

  “Rachel,” God said, “I’m going to tell you something that I want you to put into your journal.”

  I braced myself.

  He looked at me with his kind, sweet, pale blue eyes.

  “People may admire a great mind,” he said, “but they love a great heart. You have a great heart. And I assure you, people everywhere will love you for it.”

  We both fell into silence then. Me, out of shock. God, probably out of courtesy. I tried to imagine me as someone else. Someone important. Someone whom other people would sit up and listen to. But it was no use. No matter how hard I tried, all I could ever see me becoming was a couple years older; and I hardly thought aging was a sign of greatness, much less potential for becoming a child of destiny.

  On the other hand, God didn’t strike me as the kind of person to say or do stuff just for the effect it might have on people. He was a lot of things but a Showboat was not one of them.

  “Rachel,” God said, “what would you say if I told you that it is within your power to help those women you saw this morning?”

  “Me?” I asked. “How?”

  “Do you trust me?” God asked.

  I told him I did.

  “Do you have Faith in me?” God asked.

  I told him I did.

  “Enough Faith to do the seemingly impossible?”

  I told him I hoped so.

  He smiled. “Then leave the details up to me. The only thing you need to know is that I’ll be with you every step of the way.”

  Of all the questions I had, this is the only one I thought important.

  “Are you sure I won’t let you down?”

  God laced his arm inside mine.

  “I’m positive,” he said. “I’m not asking you to succeed; I’m only asking you to try.”

  We both stood.

  “We’ll begin our journey together in forty days,” he said.

  “Why forty?” I asked.

  God smiled. “I’ll explain everything then. But there’s one thing left to do before we leave.”

  He looked over my shoulder, behind me.

  “There’s someone here I thought you’d like to see,” he said.

  I turned, and there, not ten feet away, sitting on the grass, was a little girl about the age of seven, wearing a white hat and dress. Her hair was fizzy and her face covered in freckles…my freckles. I looked to God for an explanation.

  God nodded.

  “This is where she is now,” he said.

  I couldn’t speak immediately. I turned back to my daughter.

  “This too is Heaven,” he said.

  My knees began to shake.

  “Can she see me?” I asked.

  “No,” God said. “It’s the same here as before.”

  I stared at her in wordless amazement.

  “She’s older,” I said finally. “And she’s beautiful.”

  I walked closer. Close enough to hear her softly humming a tune. One that made me smile. It was Here Comes the Sun.

  God stood next to me.

  “The first Heaven you visited,” he said. “was only a portion of the whole. This is another portion.”

  “Is Joe here?” I asked.

  “No. For now, it’s just you and Teresa. When the time is right, all of you will be together again.”

  I watched my daughter for a good half-hour. She busied herself by weaving clover into a lovely green necklace, the same as I did when I was her age. When it was done, she draped it around her neck and began weaving a matching bracelet. She seemed content. Perfectly at peace.

  “Will I come back here when I die?” I asked. “To this park?”

  God touched my arm.

  “My dear, Rachel,” he said. “We built this for you.”

  And with those words, I found myself back at St. Michael’s.

  On my way out of the sanctuary, I stole a glance at my concrete Savior, hanging not in death but in glorious life on the wall beyond the altar. I said a silent prayer, made the sign of the cross and started my twenty minute walk home on what felt like a blanket of air. I don’t think my feet touched the ground once.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Entry #96

  And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  When I arrived back home, I was so happy with life in general that I almost forgot to check my messages. I had one. It was my mother.

  “Hi, dear,” she said. “It’s Me. I’m sorry not to have returned your phone calls, but I’ve been so busy these past few days and…”

  But instead of telling me all the busy stuff she’d been doing, she didn’t say anything. For a really long time. When she finally said something, she went off in a direction I hadn’t counted on.

  “Rachel, dear” she said, “I’d like for you to come visit me, if that’s OK? I’d enjoy just talking to you. I haven’t done that in a while, and, well, I’d like to spend some time with you, that’s all.”

  Again there was a long pause.

  “I miss you, sweetheart.”

  That did it. I started crying.

  After I got through bawling, I called her back. We talked for maybe ten minutes, which is eight minutes longer than our normal phone conversations. Not exactly an auspicious beginning, but here’s the thing: my mother asked me to come stay with her. Me. Her daughter, whom she called “dear” and “sweetheart,” and not just once but several times, each time sounding as though she meant it.

  I told her I’d love to come spend some time with her, and maybe sit in the swing one evening and listen to a Braves game and talk about well, talk about…things. Anything.

  She said she’d like that. She didn’t say we’d talk about me or Steve or how sorry she was that she chased Dad off, but somehow I knew those heartaches would rise to the surface on their own. I was in no hurry. The difference was that I now knew how to deal with them, and better yet, I had a feeling I could help her deal with them as well. Plus I had a feeling she could help me with Joe and Teresa.

  That evening, after dinner, as I sat in my reading chair with my half-glass of milk, this thought kept bouncing around in my head: You, Rachel Louise Walker, are the luckiest woman on the face of the earth. Don’t blow it!

  When I went to bed that night, I went to bed happy. I said a prayer, turned out the light, and lay in the darkness, thinking back through the magnificent week I’d just experienced and thinking through what lie ahead.

  And then I slept.

  In my dream that night, I was in Seurat’s painting again, an umbrella in one hand and my daughter in the other, surrounded by all the sights and sounds and smells of a perfect day in a perfect place in a perfect world. That part of Heaven God told me existed outside my back yard. I knew that someday I would come here as often as I liked, and be with my Teresa in her little white dress as often as I liked, and we would walk and talk and laugh together, as often as I liked. It would be marvelous. It would be everything God said it would be, and more.

  Then, in my dream, I heard my angel singing that melancholy French love song again, except this time it wasn’t in French, it was in English, and I understood every word. This is what my angel sang.


  To the one who has lost a someone,

  without a reason why;

  Who finds themselves alone and lonely,

  denied a last good-by.

  When the night is dark and breathless,

  when the sun refuses to rise.

  When the day is filled with heartache,

  when tears rain from the sky.

  There is hope for the hopeless,

  rest for the weary,

  joy the angels to tell.

  There is One who will listen,

  He knows how you suffer.

  For His heart is broken as well.

  I’d come to love this song long before I knew what it meant, but now that I knew, it was so different from what I’d expected. It wasn’t a love song for me after all. It was much bigger than that. It was a love song to the world in which I lived. The world in which many, many women, like myself, knew loss and pain and grief. The world in which, beginning tomorrow, I was going to do my best to help become a slightly better place.

  AFTERWORD

  ONE WEEK LATER

  Well, that’s how it happened. In one sense I’m sure that I have not done this story justice. To be in the presence of God and to describe what it’s like to be in the presence of God are two different things. It’s easy to understand The Almighty as long as you don’t have to explain him.

  I’ve tried to faithfully relate to you all he told me and how I felt at the time and which part of it made sense and which part didn’t. I’m still trying to figure out the deeper, more complicated stuff, but I’m getting better. And he’s helping.

  As for the plan God has for me? I’m still thirty days away from finding out what that’s all about, but I’m pretty excited to hear what he has to tell me. Who knows, maybe I’ll write a book about it someday.

  Despite everything that’s happened to me though, I’m still not the most confident person in the world. I’m getting better, or I should say I’m getting more comfortable with the idea that I might just amount to something someday. Stranger things have happened.

  I should be going now. I have a lot of packing to do. I leave for Savannah in two days to start living with my mom.

  Wish me luck.

  Oh, there is one last thing: Over the past few days I’ve tried to determine the most important lesson I’ve learned from this whole experience. That’s hard to do because there are so many to choose from. But if I could pick three instead of one, the first would be that suffering is in the mind, not the heart, and I have control over what it does in my life. I now have the key to unlock the door to you-know-where. The second would be that in my frantic scramble to make my life make sense, I finally figured out it’s not about me. It’s about God and learning to love those around me. Including those who took my job and killed my dog. And three, I realize now that I was asking the wrong question. Instead of wasting all my time wondering, Why is all this rotten stuff happening to me? I should have been thinking, Now that all this rotten stuff has happened to me, what can I do with it?

  Well, now I know.

  THE END

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Robert lives in Kansas City with his wife Molly and three children. He is a Christian by religion, a Methodist by denomination and a Seeker by nature.

  He wrote the trilogy RACHEL’S CONFESSION in response to a question his daughter asked, “What kind of God allows people to suffer?” The answer Robert tried to provide led him down various paths of his own Faith, ultimately guiding him to write not one novel in response to his daughter’s question, but three. THE CONFESSION is the first book.

  He is currently at work completing the second installment of this trilogy entitled THE JOURNEY, which will be available in the winter of 2011 from Sun Literary; followed by THE PROMISE in 2012.

  You’ll find the Foreword and first two chapters of THE JOURNEY on the next page. I hope you liked this book enough to read a little bit more about the second one. If not, that’s OK, I know you’re busy.

  Regardless, take care and God Bless!

  “RACHEL’S CONFESSION”

  Part Two

  THE JOURNEY

  A novel by

  ROBERT LADD

  Sun Literary

  Kansas City