He'd prayed the same thing for days now, and had determined that this would be the very last time he would ever pray this prayer. "God make me love you," Harold pleaded, head bowed, eyes squeezed shut and every fiber of his being quivering with intent. "I really mean it, God. I want you to make me love you. I know I don't love you like I should, so change me!" Lifting his head, Harold waited, eyes focused upward, straining to sense a shift within, a response to his prayer. Several long moments passed before a heavy sigh escaped Harold's lips and he slumped forward, elbows resting on his knees. Nothing. Silence. Like always.
Well, that's it, Harold thought. If God won't change me, I'm just going to stop caring about it. I'm done with asking and getting nothing.
"What're you doing?"
With a small yelp, Harold straightened in his chair, his head snapping around in the direction of the quiet, questioning voice. "Goodness! You gave me a start!" he said, rather loudly, "I didn't think anyone was in here."
"I'm cleaning the sanctuary," a frail, hunched, silver-haired figure replied, her gnarled, aged hands clutching a Dust Buster. She stood in the aisle, only three chairs away, looking at him with kind, watery eyes. "I can't do much these days," she said with a smile, waving the Dust Buster at Harold, "but I can still handle this! You'd think folks were eating lunch while the service was going on there're so many bits and crumbs on some of these chairs. Old Joe here comes in very handy, sucking up all the leavings." The ancient woman's eyes twinkled as she repeated her earlier question, "So, what're you doing?"
"Nothing," Harold responded, a little petulantly, like a naughty child caught in the act. Embarrassed, he stood to his feet, scanning the sanctuary for the nearest exit.
His elderly companion settled herself in the chair next to the one Harold had just vacated and said, "Didn't look like nothing to me. Sit, dearie, and fill me in. You looked fit to burst just now as you were praying...You were praying, weren't you? It looked like praying, anyway." She patted the seat of the chair Harold had been sitting in and grinned. "Plop yourself down and talk to me."
The blue eyes sparkling up at him and the warm smile radiating kindness and sympathy made Harold think of his mother, deceased for more than a decade, and he found himself sitting, a desperate desire to share his frustration rushing forward within him. "He's ignoring me," Harold declared, mouth twisted into a grimace.
"Who's that, dear?" the old woman queried, her gaze fixed steadily upon him. She had half-turned in her chair so she could face him more directly, her pale green cardigan twisted around her, its dark buttons in a diagonal line across her torso.
A scent of roses and lavender filled Harold's nostrils as he replied, "God. I think He's mad at me, or something. He won't answer my prayer."
“Has He got a reason to be mad at you?”
Harold wondered for a moment how careful in his answers he should be with the old gal but doubted she’d parse Greek with him and so he spoke what he felt rather than playing the seminarian. “He’s probably got lots of reasons. I’m not perfect. I feel like we’re far apart, God and me; like He’s turned away from me and is waiting for me to figure out why. I want something more with Him, something…real, not this long-distance relationship I’ve been in for years.”
Harold ran a hand through his hair and realized he was going to tell everything to the geriatric stranger next to him. “I don’t love God. Not really. I look like I do – I go to church, teach a Sunday School class, sing in the choir, read my Bible, pray – but right at my core who I really love is myself. Truth be told, God’s way down on my list of things I love.”
Harold looked sidelong at his companion, gauging her response. Her eyes had closed but a tiny smile still wrinkled the corners of her mouth. He wondered if she’d fallen asleep.
“I’m listening,” she murmured, as though reading his mind. Her eyes opened, fixing on him, and she nodded, “Go on.”
“Ah. Well, that’s it, basically. Outside of church on Sunday I’m a pretty big hypocrite. I have a temper, and when it blows, I swear and throw things around. I…look at things I shouldn’t. On my phone. It’s so easy and so tempting. I think my wife wants a divorce. My kids hate me. And I’ve been…” Harold couldn’t stop; he needed to get it all off his chest, to be totally honest, finally, with someone – even if it was a total stranger, “doing drugs. Cocaine, mostly, but other stuff, too. I’m addicted, actually.”
There. He’d said it. All of it. He felt strangely at peace, calm, lighter in himself. Was this God?
The elderly woman next to him chuckled softly, “What you’re feeling is relief, not God. Your conscience unburdened, nothing more.” She patted his arm and in an earnest tone said, “But it’s a start.”
Looking for any sign of revulsion in his confidante, Harold sat, silent, pondering what she’d said. Relief. Not God. Not the peace of God, even. Just relief. He had hoped his honesty would have done something, drawn God’s interest, closed the gap a bit between him and God. But Harold felt no more love for God now than he had before his admission of his sin.
He continued to watch his audience of one. The old gal would have made a great poker player! he thought. She gave no hint that his confession made her uneasy, or repulsed her. Her eyes were shut again and her smile was gone, but her face retained a serene character, relaxed and placid.
After a minute or so of silence, realizing he was going to get no further response from his listener, Harold spoke: “You must think I’m a pretty awful person, eh?”
“Yes, quite terrible. Wicked. Deceitful.” The old lady’s eyes opened, fixing on the large wooden, backlit cross fixed high on the wall behind the pulpit at the front of the sanctuary. “Very human.” Her gaze shifted from the cross to Harold, a sad smile on her lips. “Have you told Him?”
“Told who?”
“The One with Whom You Have To Do.”
Confused for a moment, Harold’s brows bent together, his forehead creasing in consternation. Then, his face cleared and he said, “God, you mean.” Harold rubbed the tops of his thighs, his hands sliding rapidly back-and-forth over them, and answered, “Not for a long while, actually. I kept confessing, again and again. It began to feel…fake. How could God keep forgiving me?”
“How could He not?”
“I don’t follow you,” Harold said, distracted by the realization that his companion had called him wicked and deceitful. She was right, but it stung to hear her say so. “Are you saying God has to forgive me?”
A chuckle rose from the little woman in the pale, green cardigan. “Not exactly, dearie.” Her blue eyes twinkled at him, “Do you deserve to be forgiven by God? Does God owe it to you to forgive your sin, do you think?”
“No. I suppose not.”
“Right.” Eyes wide now, her expression serious, his aged friend (for this was how Harold was thinking of her now) put a veiny, spotted hand on his arm and said, “So, why does He? Why does God forgive you?”
Harold was no stranger to this question, having asked it himself of the students in his Sunday School class. “Because of Christ. What he did on the cross, atoning for my sins.”
Nodding, the old woman leaned forward, her creased face getting close to Harold’s. “And what he did? It was perfect, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Complete?”
“Right.”
“Fully satisfied God forever?”
“Yes…”
“Can you get to the end of what Jesus did on the cross? Can you sin so much, your sin exceeds his sacrifice for it?”
“Well, no…”
The woman was watching him with great intensity, her hand squeezing his arm. “Where sin abounds, God’s grace abounds much more. Why have you stopped confessing your sin to Him, then? Your sin stops up the works, puts a barrier between you and God that remains ‘til you take it down.”
“By confession, you mean?”
“Exactly.”
“So, my prayers to God have been “stopped up” by my not confessing my sin to Him?”
“Right-o, dearie! Got it in one!” The old lady sat back in her chair, looking again to the cross at the front of the sanctuary. It stood out starkly in the shadowy theater lighting of the huge room, drawing the eye. She sighed. “As it piles up, sin blinds us, confuses us, hides the truth from us - the truth we once knew well - in its darkness.” Her silvery curls swayed and bobbed as she shook her head. “Better to confess it and remain in the light.” Noticing her skewed buttons, the elderly woman pulled on her cardigan, moving the buttons into a proper vertical line. “Well, I’d better get at it,” she said as she hefted her Dust Buster, “The chairs can’t clean themselves.”
Gingerly, the old lady shifted herself to the front edge of the chair seat, grabbed the top of the chair back in front of her with one hand and prepared to stand. “Wait,” Harold said. “If I confess, will God make me love Him like I asked? More than drugs? More than inappropriate content? More than myself?” He had stood as the woman had angled herself to the edge of her seat, his hands hovering on either side of her to offer support. “I don’t want to just keep confessing over and over. Even I know this isn’t what the Christian life is supposed to be like. If I don’t change, I’m going to end up a broke, addicted, divorcee.”
“So that was what you were praying about when I came along?” The old lady wobbled to standing, grimaced briefly, then fished about in the pocket of her cardigan for a moment, finally drawing out a scotch mint in a cellophane wrapper. She handed it to Harold with a broad smile on her face, “Here. Have a candy.”
Without thinking, Harold took the mint, unwrapped it and popped it into his mouth. “Thanks,” he murmured.
“Well, I’ve got up and I’m not going back down so I can just get up again in a minute,” the old woman declared, “Too much of a bother when you’re stiff as a board and weak as a kitten.” She looked up at Harold and said, “You want to love God?”
“Yes,” Harold replied.
“Why?”
“Aren’t we supposed to love God?”
“So, you want to love God ‘cause you’re supposed to?”
Harold didn’t much like how that sounded: dutiful, obligatory, not very…loving. “Well, when you put it like that…” he began.
“It’s not how I put, young man,” his ancient companion remarked, archly.
“Loving God is the best life to live, right?” Harold felt strangely like a child being taught a lesson, scolded, even, a bit, but by the nicest possible person. He sucked on the mint, thoughtfully.
The old lady sighed, her smile shrinking and her eyes growing hard. “What is it you want from God?” she pressed. “What’s loving Him going to get you?”
Harold answered immediately: “Peace, power, wisdom, joy – You know,” he waved his hand as though shooing a fly, “the Fruit of the Spirit and so on.”
“Ah,” the elderly woman said, her eyes sad, a sickly smile twisting her lips. “I had a dog, once.” She paused, looking down at “Ol Joe” in her hands.
This is an odd tangent to take, Harold thought. “I don’t –”
“It was a rotten dog,” the old woman continued, gesturing dangerously with the Dust Buster in punctuation of her words, “A lap dog. Fluffy. Cute. Little, black eyes. Could have fit in my purse.” She looked up at Harold and in a stern voice, went on, “But it was the most selfish dog I’ve ever encountered. Like a cat, really. If I wasn’t petting him, or feeding him, or taking him for a walk, well, I might as well have been dead for all the interest he took in me. All he wanted was what I could give him; he didn’t want me.”
“I see…” said Harold.
Her eyebrows climbed up her forehead, forming deep wrinkles in her skin. Face filled with bemusement, she said, “No, you don’t.” Then, she tapped him in the chest with the Dust Buster. “What’s my wretched dog got to do with you loving God?”
That was supposed to be my question! Harold thought. “Was it a chihuahua?” he asked, stalling for time, his thunder stolen.
The woman turned to examine the chair she’d been sitting on. “Looks like I’ll have to sit down again.”
Continued in following post.
Well, that's it, Harold thought. If God won't change me, I'm just going to stop caring about it. I'm done with asking and getting nothing.
"What're you doing?"
With a small yelp, Harold straightened in his chair, his head snapping around in the direction of the quiet, questioning voice. "Goodness! You gave me a start!" he said, rather loudly, "I didn't think anyone was in here."
"I'm cleaning the sanctuary," a frail, hunched, silver-haired figure replied, her gnarled, aged hands clutching a Dust Buster. She stood in the aisle, only three chairs away, looking at him with kind, watery eyes. "I can't do much these days," she said with a smile, waving the Dust Buster at Harold, "but I can still handle this! You'd think folks were eating lunch while the service was going on there're so many bits and crumbs on some of these chairs. Old Joe here comes in very handy, sucking up all the leavings." The ancient woman's eyes twinkled as she repeated her earlier question, "So, what're you doing?"
"Nothing," Harold responded, a little petulantly, like a naughty child caught in the act. Embarrassed, he stood to his feet, scanning the sanctuary for the nearest exit.
His elderly companion settled herself in the chair next to the one Harold had just vacated and said, "Didn't look like nothing to me. Sit, dearie, and fill me in. You looked fit to burst just now as you were praying...You were praying, weren't you? It looked like praying, anyway." She patted the seat of the chair Harold had been sitting in and grinned. "Plop yourself down and talk to me."
The blue eyes sparkling up at him and the warm smile radiating kindness and sympathy made Harold think of his mother, deceased for more than a decade, and he found himself sitting, a desperate desire to share his frustration rushing forward within him. "He's ignoring me," Harold declared, mouth twisted into a grimace.
"Who's that, dear?" the old woman queried, her gaze fixed steadily upon him. She had half-turned in her chair so she could face him more directly, her pale green cardigan twisted around her, its dark buttons in a diagonal line across her torso.
A scent of roses and lavender filled Harold's nostrils as he replied, "God. I think He's mad at me, or something. He won't answer my prayer."
“Has He got a reason to be mad at you?”
Harold wondered for a moment how careful in his answers he should be with the old gal but doubted she’d parse Greek with him and so he spoke what he felt rather than playing the seminarian. “He’s probably got lots of reasons. I’m not perfect. I feel like we’re far apart, God and me; like He’s turned away from me and is waiting for me to figure out why. I want something more with Him, something…real, not this long-distance relationship I’ve been in for years.”
Harold ran a hand through his hair and realized he was going to tell everything to the geriatric stranger next to him. “I don’t love God. Not really. I look like I do – I go to church, teach a Sunday School class, sing in the choir, read my Bible, pray – but right at my core who I really love is myself. Truth be told, God’s way down on my list of things I love.”
Harold looked sidelong at his companion, gauging her response. Her eyes had closed but a tiny smile still wrinkled the corners of her mouth. He wondered if she’d fallen asleep.
“I’m listening,” she murmured, as though reading his mind. Her eyes opened, fixing on him, and she nodded, “Go on.”
“Ah. Well, that’s it, basically. Outside of church on Sunday I’m a pretty big hypocrite. I have a temper, and when it blows, I swear and throw things around. I…look at things I shouldn’t. On my phone. It’s so easy and so tempting. I think my wife wants a divorce. My kids hate me. And I’ve been…” Harold couldn’t stop; he needed to get it all off his chest, to be totally honest, finally, with someone – even if it was a total stranger, “doing drugs. Cocaine, mostly, but other stuff, too. I’m addicted, actually.”
There. He’d said it. All of it. He felt strangely at peace, calm, lighter in himself. Was this God?
The elderly woman next to him chuckled softly, “What you’re feeling is relief, not God. Your conscience unburdened, nothing more.” She patted his arm and in an earnest tone said, “But it’s a start.”
Looking for any sign of revulsion in his confidante, Harold sat, silent, pondering what she’d said. Relief. Not God. Not the peace of God, even. Just relief. He had hoped his honesty would have done something, drawn God’s interest, closed the gap a bit between him and God. But Harold felt no more love for God now than he had before his admission of his sin.
He continued to watch his audience of one. The old gal would have made a great poker player! he thought. She gave no hint that his confession made her uneasy, or repulsed her. Her eyes were shut again and her smile was gone, but her face retained a serene character, relaxed and placid.
After a minute or so of silence, realizing he was going to get no further response from his listener, Harold spoke: “You must think I’m a pretty awful person, eh?”
“Yes, quite terrible. Wicked. Deceitful.” The old lady’s eyes opened, fixing on the large wooden, backlit cross fixed high on the wall behind the pulpit at the front of the sanctuary. “Very human.” Her gaze shifted from the cross to Harold, a sad smile on her lips. “Have you told Him?”
“Told who?”
“The One with Whom You Have To Do.”
Confused for a moment, Harold’s brows bent together, his forehead creasing in consternation. Then, his face cleared and he said, “God, you mean.” Harold rubbed the tops of his thighs, his hands sliding rapidly back-and-forth over them, and answered, “Not for a long while, actually. I kept confessing, again and again. It began to feel…fake. How could God keep forgiving me?”
“How could He not?”
“I don’t follow you,” Harold said, distracted by the realization that his companion had called him wicked and deceitful. She was right, but it stung to hear her say so. “Are you saying God has to forgive me?”
A chuckle rose from the little woman in the pale, green cardigan. “Not exactly, dearie.” Her blue eyes twinkled at him, “Do you deserve to be forgiven by God? Does God owe it to you to forgive your sin, do you think?”
“No. I suppose not.”
“Right.” Eyes wide now, her expression serious, his aged friend (for this was how Harold was thinking of her now) put a veiny, spotted hand on his arm and said, “So, why does He? Why does God forgive you?”
Harold was no stranger to this question, having asked it himself of the students in his Sunday School class. “Because of Christ. What he did on the cross, atoning for my sins.”
Nodding, the old woman leaned forward, her creased face getting close to Harold’s. “And what he did? It was perfect, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Complete?”
“Right.”
“Fully satisfied God forever?”
“Yes…”
“Can you get to the end of what Jesus did on the cross? Can you sin so much, your sin exceeds his sacrifice for it?”
“Well, no…”
The woman was watching him with great intensity, her hand squeezing his arm. “Where sin abounds, God’s grace abounds much more. Why have you stopped confessing your sin to Him, then? Your sin stops up the works, puts a barrier between you and God that remains ‘til you take it down.”
“By confession, you mean?”
“Exactly.”
“So, my prayers to God have been “stopped up” by my not confessing my sin to Him?”
“Right-o, dearie! Got it in one!” The old lady sat back in her chair, looking again to the cross at the front of the sanctuary. It stood out starkly in the shadowy theater lighting of the huge room, drawing the eye. She sighed. “As it piles up, sin blinds us, confuses us, hides the truth from us - the truth we once knew well - in its darkness.” Her silvery curls swayed and bobbed as she shook her head. “Better to confess it and remain in the light.” Noticing her skewed buttons, the elderly woman pulled on her cardigan, moving the buttons into a proper vertical line. “Well, I’d better get at it,” she said as she hefted her Dust Buster, “The chairs can’t clean themselves.”
Gingerly, the old lady shifted herself to the front edge of the chair seat, grabbed the top of the chair back in front of her with one hand and prepared to stand. “Wait,” Harold said. “If I confess, will God make me love Him like I asked? More than drugs? More than inappropriate content? More than myself?” He had stood as the woman had angled herself to the edge of her seat, his hands hovering on either side of her to offer support. “I don’t want to just keep confessing over and over. Even I know this isn’t what the Christian life is supposed to be like. If I don’t change, I’m going to end up a broke, addicted, divorcee.”
“So that was what you were praying about when I came along?” The old lady wobbled to standing, grimaced briefly, then fished about in the pocket of her cardigan for a moment, finally drawing out a scotch mint in a cellophane wrapper. She handed it to Harold with a broad smile on her face, “Here. Have a candy.”
Without thinking, Harold took the mint, unwrapped it and popped it into his mouth. “Thanks,” he murmured.
“Well, I’ve got up and I’m not going back down so I can just get up again in a minute,” the old woman declared, “Too much of a bother when you’re stiff as a board and weak as a kitten.” She looked up at Harold and said, “You want to love God?”
“Yes,” Harold replied.
“Why?”
“Aren’t we supposed to love God?”
“So, you want to love God ‘cause you’re supposed to?”
Harold didn’t much like how that sounded: dutiful, obligatory, not very…loving. “Well, when you put it like that…” he began.
“It’s not how I put, young man,” his ancient companion remarked, archly.
“Loving God is the best life to live, right?” Harold felt strangely like a child being taught a lesson, scolded, even, a bit, but by the nicest possible person. He sucked on the mint, thoughtfully.
The old lady sighed, her smile shrinking and her eyes growing hard. “What is it you want from God?” she pressed. “What’s loving Him going to get you?”
Harold answered immediately: “Peace, power, wisdom, joy – You know,” he waved his hand as though shooing a fly, “the Fruit of the Spirit and so on.”
“Ah,” the elderly woman said, her eyes sad, a sickly smile twisting her lips. “I had a dog, once.” She paused, looking down at “Ol Joe” in her hands.
This is an odd tangent to take, Harold thought. “I don’t –”
“It was a rotten dog,” the old woman continued, gesturing dangerously with the Dust Buster in punctuation of her words, “A lap dog. Fluffy. Cute. Little, black eyes. Could have fit in my purse.” She looked up at Harold and in a stern voice, went on, “But it was the most selfish dog I’ve ever encountered. Like a cat, really. If I wasn’t petting him, or feeding him, or taking him for a walk, well, I might as well have been dead for all the interest he took in me. All he wanted was what I could give him; he didn’t want me.”
“I see…” said Harold.
Her eyebrows climbed up her forehead, forming deep wrinkles in her skin. Face filled with bemusement, she said, “No, you don’t.” Then, she tapped him in the chest with the Dust Buster. “What’s my wretched dog got to do with you loving God?”
That was supposed to be my question! Harold thought. “Was it a chihuahua?” he asked, stalling for time, his thunder stolen.
The woman turned to examine the chair she’d been sitting on. “Looks like I’ll have to sit down again.”
Continued in following post.
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