If You Really Knew Me (Anyone Who Believes Book 1)

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  Perhaps it was an architectural accident—hissing whispers bouncing off glass and metal, the lobby full of people and noise—but, even facing the windows with her back turned toward him, Dixon grasped enough of what his daughter said to want an explanation. Not there, of course, that would be too public. But he would have to hear today, as soon as he could get alone with Sara.

  That opportunity didn’t come until much later in the day. Between Dixon’s need and its fulfillment stood the ceremony in the gym—Sara graduating with honors—the reception at the house, a flux and flow of people from the church and the neighborhood all afternoon and into the evening. Then Sara disappeared for the primetime party hours. She was out of sight and out of the range of Dixon’s reach in more ways than he would have imagined.

  At Candy’s house, Sara felt a freedom far beyond the release from all those years of public school education. Even the usual surreptitious offers of drugs or alcohol, as the night drove on, lacked both the temptation and the fearful condemnation Sara had experienced in the past. She looked at Denny Winslow when he flashed her the sight of a joint and raised his eyebrows in silent offer. How many times had she refused offers like this from Denny and his friends? But this time it was different. She felt as if she could do it. She knew she could say “yes,” that she was free to choose. And she laughed. With such an expansive feeling of freedom, why waste it on something so stupid?

  This felt like the first time she had actually chosen. Shaking her head at Denny, smiling without the usual biting disapproval of his offer, she simply said “no.” It was her own “no” this time. As she walked down the hall, back into the living room, where clusters of teens huddled and laughed and even danced, she giggled. Anyone who had been watching might have thought that she had said “yes” to Denny, or to some other offer of mood-elevating substances.

  Candy spotted Sara after the laughter subsided, but she recognized a radiance on Sara’s face, her head raised proudly, her eyes surveying friends and acquaintances, and afraid of nothing. Near the fireplace, where three couples sat squished as close as possible, oblivious to the universe around them, Candy intercepted Sara’s stroll through the room.

  “Okay, I know you haven’t been drinking or anything, but you look just like you have, only better,” Candy said, having started talking before she knew what she was going to say.

  Sara laughed, as if Candy’s splash of affirmation granted permission for her to release the elation, like a bird uncaged again. “You should try it, Candy. I’m sure it’s better than drugs,” Sara said, teasing, more than offering a formal invitation.

  Candy just shook her head. “I guess I’m just not that kinda girl.” She tried to joke, but felt the irony of her own admission. “I mean,” she said, more seriously, “I think I’m just not ready.”

  Ready for what? Sara thought, as she looked at Candy’s shifting brown eyes, cast now at the floor, looking for a place to escape Sara’s shameless gaze. Her evening ended earlier than she had planned, as far as parties go, that is. Most of Sara’s friends expected to be out all night. But Sara retired, saying goodbye with hugs for Candy, Jenny and the others. Kim had stayed away, accustomed to excluding herself from those sorts of parties. Was Sara becoming like Kim? Or was she just becoming more herself?

  She sang aloud to the songs on her favorite Christian radio station on the way home, not conscious of choosing to sing worship music instead of trying to hook up with the hottest guy available that night, nor trying some new stimulant or other. She chose. But she did so without self-consciousness.

  Floating like this through the kitchen door of her parents’ house, Sara knocked into an obstacle to her bliss. Home early enough to find her dad searching for a snack in the refrigerator, Sara closed the door and said a minor hello to the man in his sweat pants leaning into the fridge. After the party in the house that day, the contents of the shelves and drawers in the refrigerator would be much more enticing than usual. But Dixon hesitated over suspicion at those enticements. “What would be healthy?” he was thinking, when the back door clattered open and Sara slipped in.

  “Oh,” Dixon said. “I was thinking you’d be out all night. I wanted to talk to you about something, but I didn’t expect you home so soon.”

  Familiar with her father’s tendency to process his thoughts aloud, Sara could tell that he was adjusting from a confrontation on the Sunday after graduation to one late on graduation night. Not a fan of confrontations, no matter their date or time, Sara was glad to get it over with as soon as possible.

  “What did you want to talk about,” she said, slipping her shoes off and picking them up, one red, short heal in each hand.

  Dixon closed the fridge door, feeling that yielding to the temptations in there would diminish his authority in what followed. “Uh, well, I heard what Jenny said before graduation this afternoon, about you feeling different.” He stopped there. The most disturbing words had actually come from the mouth of his own daughter, words about praying in another language. But Dixon enjoyed confrontation little more than Sara did and mitigated the pain of this one by glancing off of the real issue. He knew Sara would recognize his point of concern anyway.

  “Oh, you heard that?” Sara said. She didn’t sound as surprised or guilty as both she and her father would have expected. The emboldening freedom she had danced with at the party seemed to have accompanied her home.

  “Yeah, I heard what you said.” Dixon slipped from targeting Jenny’s revelation, to the one that really bothered him. Sara’s upheld chin and steady, though gentle, voice provoked him to a more frontal assault on his daughter’s experimentation. That’s what he had labeled it, for his own sake, to contain the damage.

  Sara increased her volume slightly and dug the knife in deep, in her effort to get this over. “We wanted to check out Beau Dupere for ourselves.”

  Dixon had intuited that there might be a connection, remembering their discussion about Jenny’s mother being healed. He looked at his grown up daughter, standing there, barefoot on the cool kitchen floor, still wearing her sophisticated red dress and holding those shoes like Audrey Hepburn in some old romantic film.

  “Your mother’s still awake. We should go and see her,” Dixon said, his voice muted, as if speaking through a plastic bubble around his head. Sara followed him toward her parents’ bedroom.

  Kristen sat on the bed, one leg dangling toward the floor, her pale blue satin pajamas shining against the dark blue bedspread. She hadn’t yet pulled down the covers and the news ran on the flat screen TV. With the sound turned down, the stories ran there neglected.

  It occurred then to Sara that her parents had been preparing all day for this little talk. They must have been stressing about what to say, about what it all meant. She sampled a brief sympathy for their angst, though she could barely imagine exactly what it felt like to be a parent, to be responsible for the lives of young and vulnerable people who would eventually become independent.

  “Oh, you’re home,” Kristen said. She glanced at Dixon and back at Sara, surmising the acceleration of the schedule for the planned parental intervention. She closed the newspaper she had been perusing for sales and slid her folded leg free, turning toward her daughter and husband. She picked up the remote from behind her and clicked off the TV.

  Dixon took up his place beside the bed, next to Kristen, his bare feet dug into the pale gray carpet as if needing the grip to launch his attack. His mind wandered to the leftovers in the kitchen again but he reeled it back in, forcing his resolve to latch down tight and stay with him. He looked down at Kristen and filled her in on the new information he had received.

  “She went to a Beau Dupere meeting to see for herself,” he said simply, no feeling betrayed in his voice.

  Kristen didn’t know what the right response to that was. She could understand why a teenager would follow her curiosity, especially after the unsatisfying confrontation a week ago. But she knew she dare not allow any sympathy to leak into her words. As a res
ult, she said nothing, just turning her gaze on Sara, as if to prompt her daughter to account for her actions.

  Sara took the cue. “I went with Jenny, Kim and Candy. We all wanted to see for ourselves.” But that much explanation stayed clear of the point, like standing in the shower but avoiding the water.

  “You know we don’t believe this sort of thing,” Dixon said, as if Sara had filled in the rest of the story, that she had not attended as a mere observer, that she had taken a taste of what was on offer there.

  Sara furrowed her firm young brow against the “we” in her father’s declaration. Had she ever been authentically included in that “we?” Based on her experience at the Beau Dupere meeting, and her continued sense of spiritual renewal, she concluded that if she had ever been part of her family’s disbelief she had recently fallen out of it.

  His daughter’s silent scowl provoked Dixon to launch into a biblical and theological explanation for why he, and whoever he included in that “we,” didn’t believe in that sort of thing. A thorough explanation, with rebuttals and expansions would have been done sitting down at a table, with open Bibles and notes. Instead, Sara stood with her small red shoes in each hand, her toes crossed over each other, her graduation dress sagging at one shoulder. A father who was truly present in that moment, who truly saw his daughter—part woman and part girl—standing like that before him, would have hugged her, would have postponed the discussion and thanked God for such a daughter. Dixon would later wish he had been such a father.

  Even as he spoke, Sara could tell that Dixon barely believed his own explanation for their opposition to the sort of spiritual manifestations she had not only seen but had imbibed. She had done it without planning to hurt her father, though she must have known such pain would result as soon as she inhaled the glory-laden air in that meeting. Sara wasn’t thinking about her father just then, however, just as it seemed to her that he wasn’t thinking about her as he rattled through his umpteen points against speaking in tongues and related activities.

  Shifting to standing with one foot fully on top of the other, her right leg bearing all of her weight, her arms crossed in front of her now, Sara endured the meandering lecture until her father ran out of ammunition. She remained standing, as his smoking guns began to click, empty, harmless. She had survived.

  Kristen looked at her husband as if to say, as she had wondered a week before, “Is that all you have?” From her, this was not a theological or exegetical critique, only a mother’s disappointment that her other half had not lifted more of the load, more of the burden of keeping their family together.

  Dixon stood still, even holding his breath for a moment. He let out that breath slowly. For a second, he allowed himself some curiosity. “Did the other girls have the same experience as you?”

  Sara tipped her head a bit. Why would he ask that?

  “Not exactly the same. Kim was already part of a church that does stuff like that, and Jenny had been to meetings like that before, when her mom was healed. Candy doesn’t chew her finger nails anymore, after someone touched her at the meeting.”

  She didn’t mention the healing from cancer, or Candy’s freedom from that old habit, as evidence on her side, but Dixon took it that way. He aborted the refutation of modern healing, however, when he remembered how poorly it was received the last time. Without that response, without any response, he felt the life drained out of him. His voice sounded hollow, when finally he said. “Well, I can’t have you doing this sort of thing as long as you’re living in my house.”

  Sara let that penetrate the late night numbness that had deepened when her father attempted and failed at convincing her. “Can’t have you doing this sort of thing.” What did that mean? What did he want? It wasn’t like he was forbidding her to smoke pot or sleep with her boyfriend in his house. It was prayer. But not the approved sort of prayer.

  Beginning to nod, as if her head had cut loose from some sort of mooring, not fully invested in the gesture, Sara said, “Okay. I’ll be out as soon as I can arrange it.” And she turned and left the room.

  She didn’t know if she meant it, just as she couldn’t be sure that her dad meant what he had said. But she knew that her life had changed forever on that graduation day. She had graduated from childhood to adulthood much more quickly than she would have guessed possible.

  Hearing the sound her mother made when she declared her willingness to find other lodging, weakened her resolve only a little.

  That night, as she lay in her bed, trying to drain all of the anxiety that had begun accumulating when she walked out of her parents’ room, she heard an unfamiliar noise. But she knew what it was. It was the sound of her father weeping violently. Even as she allowed that arrow to pierce between ribs and lodge against the deepest chambers of her heart, she knew that she wouldn’t be turning back. She wouldn’t be staying. Even if they reconciled for some short period of time, she was now more a resident of some home she had not yet found, like Abraham looking for that land God promised to show him.

  With these resolutions revolving around and around in her mind, she finally fell into a fitful sleep.

  Practical Theology

  In seminary, Dixon took a course entitled, “Practical Theology.” The joke among the students, of course, was that the rest of the theology was entirely impractical. Privately, Dixon liked that title, and took it as a sort of endorsement of his fondness for keeping church practical and manageable. Because he believed that he was embarking on carrying responsibility for the spiritual growth of a whole congregation, he insisted, at least internally, that this task be manageable, that it come with easy-grip handles and a clear instruction manual, written only in plain English.

  When he met a young man in that seminary who admitted to coming from a church where people listened for the voice of God and genuinely believed that they heard that voice, he felt a tight discomfort, like the way his pants felt after Thanksgiving dinner. Instead of loosening his belt, however, he found relief by staying clear of that young mystic and any who sounded like him.

  Spiritual experiences such as surrounded all the major historical revivals—weeping, falling on the ground, laughing, and even speaking in tongues—fell short of Dixon’s requirements for orderly church governance. He didn’t want to be stuck with responsibility for something so out of control. That was the sort of trap he felt clamping down on him when he worked for Tom Schaefer, a young entrepreneur who bought, rehabbed and sold houses when Dixon was a teenager. He once instructed Dixon to break up some furniture and drop it out the window onto the lawn, but was upset later when he found dust and slivers scattered across the hardwood floors, as well as the lawn. Throughout his life, Dixon had arched up against such unfair job descriptions, and he wasn’t about to follow a lifelong career in a direction that included such impossibly contradictory obligations.

  If he was going to be charged with the spiritual welfare of hundreds of people, he couldn’t have them surrendering to powerful unseen forces all the time, even if they believed those forces to be of divine origin. As far as Dixon was concerned, the very disorderliness of what he called “holy roller” churches proved that those powerful forces were not from God. Certainly, God would not be like his summer camp supervisor, who insisted that Dixon control the behavior of fifteen ten-year-olds, without so much as a saber-rattling threat of violence.

  Deeper than his disdain for disorderly behavior, and for emotionalism in faith and worship, was Dixon’s suspicion that those emotionally expressive churches didn’t believe in Christian obedience, at least not the way he did. In the early 1990s, when he was just finishing his seminary training in the upper Midwest, he suffered through half of a sermon/lecture/rant from a fellow seminarian who claimed a spiritual awakening, discovered at a famously enflamed church that was attracting curious and parched believers from around the world. As the emotionally unstable student gushed his new revelation for the gathered audience in the seminary commons, Dixon detected an irresponsible attitu
de toward both order and obedience. The teary-eyed young man spoke on and on about his intimacy with the God of all creation, and referred to his old way of thinking as graceless law. Since Dixon had shared two classes with that student, before his reconversion, he knew that it was faith just like his own that his classmate now rejected, as if it were the equivalent to the legalism of the biblical Pharisees.

  That cheap grace would infect a congregation with the notion that they could each do whatever they want, because God would love them no matter what they did, like a weak and permissive father. But that didn’t sound like any father Dixon recognized, not his own father, nor the God of the Bible who punished the wrongdoers and promised to discipline those He loves.

  In Beau Dupere, Dixon found a vindication of his rejection of that kind of faith, having spat it out like a mouth full of rancid milk those many years ago. Now, decades later, it still smelled the same. He didn’t need to taste it again to know that it was bad.

  The Man Who Made the Myth

  “So, young lady, what did you wanna ask?” Jack Williams sat behind his desk, his chair pushed back, his legs crossed and his hands behind his head, leaning back as far as one dared in a tilting office chair. The use of the phrase “young lady” was a grandfatherly habit, though Jack Williams was probably not quite old enough to be Anna’s actual grandfather. And he didn’t look it. His nearly shoulder-length gray-streaked hair covered most of the top of his head, and his jowly face sparkled with energy, his skin a golden tan. He looked at Anna through little rectangular glasses that one would expect to see on a European film director or trendy New York sculptor.