The Only Reason I Like the Facebook Timeline
His hunger for God was apparent. Every time she mentioned another long Sunday at church he hit her with a list of questions that made her feel the way her sources must as she interviewed them for another story. He wanted to know what she believed and why. She told him, God is love and desires communion with creation. But she didn’t know how to explain the moments she’d felt the spirit of God move through her body and tickle her toes.
He told her he’d made a deal with God: “I said ‘Look God, I won’t blame you for the bad stuff as long as you don’t expect me to thank you for the good stuff. And I’ll never ask you for anything.'”
He told her he couldn’t pray, ‘Oh thank you Lord for that promotion’ when there are people in Nicaragua searching for dinner in landfills. She didn’t know what to say. She thanked God daily for her reporting gig, her Chevy Cavalier, her two-bedroom home, for the blue of a cloudless sky and for the flavor of wild berry tea smoothies. What was she to say?
He said that he could never thank God for saving him from a tornado if his neighbor’s house was destroyed. He believed in God, but in an absent one, not a Heavenly Father just a deadbeat dad.
He wanted to know how she pictured God. She didn’t. Not anymore. It took her years to stop seeing the big white man with white hair and white eyes that she prayed to as a little girl. Her God was ever present but was now invisible and that’s the way she liked it. Because most white men intimidated the shit out of her worshiping one was out of the question. Fear of the Lord couldn’t mean this, she reasoned.
God could be anything, he said. God could be a vapor. Or ice cream, she thought but she didn’t say it out loud for fear it would confuse him or convince him she prayed to false idols.
But she and he had one thing in common – the thought of a God that played favorites terrified them both. She told her husband that once and he tried to convince her she should be grateful to be chosen. But instead she wanted to vomit from disgust and fear because what kind of parent has a favorite child?
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