If God Loves Me, Why Can't I Cook?

The following excerpt from my latest book, Believer in Waiting, seems quite appropriate on the day before Thanksgiving (when I will not be cooking but helping to clean up after a community dinner where my family and I will receive the benefits of those who can cook -- this is an event that takes place every year and is sponsored by our parish; it is for everyone, whether rich or poor, alone or endowed with many local family members and friends; it is a community event that all look forward to and to which each contributes in his or her own way by cooking, serving, or cleaning up).

Everyone knows that I cannot cook a decent meal. As for the rest of my homemaking skills, let us just say that my passing grade in Home Economics as a child was a gift from a teacher who liked me but not necessarily a reflection of my homemaking ability. I think she just did not want to ruin my straight-A average. Maybe she gave me the grade for effort rather than result.

When my kids were growing up, if I wanted to get them to do something, I would just have to threaten to cook dinner myself rather than their dad. Even as youngsters, they knew how to cook well. (Their spouses love that.) As an adult, Doah wrote a book with my help, an exercise in understanding and developing literacy. The topic of all the tales in the book is my sad lack of homemaking skills and the horrendous outcome of my attempts to use them. The stories are as true as they are hilarious. Why I got missed in the distribution of talents that most women have, I may never know.

Every once in a while, though, I try to remedy the situation—to no avail. On Donnie’s birthday recently, I decided to make him dinner, freeing him from that daily task. He protested, but then realized that this was going to be my gift to him so he let me try. I had purchased some fresh squid; they are easy to cook. A salad and some vegetables, rolls, desserts—voila! a great dinner! Except it was, following historic patterns, not edible. Donnie made himself a toasted cheese sandwich, and, as happens in such cases, I ate the inedible meal just to prove something. (Just what I am trying to prove in these cases, I am not sure.)
So, I ask, if God loves me, why can’t I cook? This question parallels the kinds of questions that my catechism kids ask: if God loves me, why can’t I do something I want to do, why don’t I get an A grade on my project or test, why can’t I have a specific gift or opportunity, i.e. why is life so tough sometimes? I love the book by Lorraine Peterson that attempts to answer this question: If God Loves Me, Why Can’t I Get My Locker Open? I recommend it to all parents, catechists, and teenagers.

In thinking about this question, a possible answer begins forming in my mind. I cannot do things perfectly because I am human, ordinary. Not everything I want will go my way because it should not go my way because I am human, ordinary, and need to grow and learn. I need to walk in the path of the cross because it is that path that brings a different kind of life, one that leads to resurrection, one that is pleasing to God.

And then the life of Jesus comes to mind. He did not choose to live an extraordinary life but an ordinary one although the way he lived it was extraordinary. If he had not lived an ordinary life, we would not have the wonderful example of how we, as ordinary, human beings, can and should live. He gave us the example of how to live the way God would have us live, how to be servants to those around us, how to improve life for others, and how to bear our cross, whatever that may be, with grace and trust. He gave us the answer to the question that my catechism kids ask.

Oh, yes, now I know the answer. Why can’t I get the locker open, cook a meal for my husband, receive only accolades, have no financial worries, birth only healthy children, etc.? I cannot do those things precisely because God does love me! Just like God loved Job. Just like God loved Jesus!

Believer in Waiting

My second spiritual book is out! The title, as you can see, is A Believer-in-Waiting's First Encounters with God. I will try to post some excerpts here from time to time. (Actually, I have already posted some excerpts from the draft on my Modern Mysticism blog.) The first set of books will be going to reviewers who signed up with Library Thing, but I notice that Amazon has been quick off the start and already has it available for ordering. I hope that anyone who reads either the book or the excerpts will enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them. It was one of those books that seems to write itself. I do hope to have copies of my own in about a week, at which time I will host a book coming out party for local friends who read the prepublication manuscript and provided feedback. If you read it, I would love to hear your feedback!!

God's Credit Card

I have posted periodically on various blogs about God's credit card. In my forthcoming book, I have organized the stories into chronological order in order to make a consistent story. Here it is:

As I have grown in faith, metanoia affected not only my overtly spiritual life, i.e. those events and activities associated with the church, but also it permeated all of my life. One area involved how I began to deal with panhandlers and others in need. For years, I have had queasy feelings about giving money to panhandlers, except in those cases where I had the time, cash in hand, and opportunity to walk with them to a nearby fast-food joint or restaurant to buy them food. I disliked the thought of giving to people who did not really need the money or to people who were going to use it to make their condition worse, e.g., buying alcohol with it. Over time, I came to the conclusion that true giving is separated from dictating what a person does with the gift. So, that dilemma for me was resolved.

There arose another dilemma, though. I do not carry money with me very often because I have so often been mugged. I do not need to carry money because we are a plastic society, pretty much worldwide these days. So, whenever a panhandler or a person clearly in need crossed my path, I was rarely able to help. Then, I would ask God to give me another chance to help—and would blow it again because I would have only plastic with me and, as usual, it was nearly maxed out. Then, I would ask for another chance and blow that one and so on and so forth.

On one of those occasions when I was apologizing for missing yet another opportunity to help one of God's people in need into my head popped the concept that God can use plastic, too. And so I got God a credit card.

It was one of those card offers for a small credit line: $250. One can, with time, increase it as the bank and the customer build a relationship, but $250 seemed to be quite an appropriate limit. I reasoned that I would never end up putting that much on the card and that with that limit I could not possibly get in over my head. From then on, I reserved this particular card for God’s purposes. Whenever God put someone in need in my path, I would pay with God’s credit card.

People in Need
At first, the opportunities to use God’s credit card matched my expectations. A couple of examples come to mind:

(1) I met a man in the parking lot of our local grocery store. He was on his way from Ohio to southern California to move in with his daughter, his luck having run out in Ohio. He had run out of food money the day before and was hungry. He asked for a couple of dollars for a doughnut and coffee. He thought that would carry him through the remaining six hours of his trip. I told him I had no cash but did have a "special" credit card. If he would pick out what he wanted for lunch and for the road, I would pay for it. So, he did, very judiciously. At the same time, I picked up some strawberries for dessert for dinner for Donnie and me. They were on sale: buy one, get one free. (This kind of surprising sale, just at the right moment, happens so regularly now that I would be surprised if it did not happen.) So, I gave the free strawberries to the hungry man; obviously, the sale was intended for him. As for paying off the credit card bill, the amount was so minor that it was no problem at all; I was able to include it in our food budget for the month without crimping our style, simple as our style tends to be.

(2) A couple of nights ago, about the time that the town was rolling up its sidewalks, I dashed to the grocery store to pick up some supper, our food supplies having become somewhat depleted while I was traveling. There, a young couple came up to me, the girl crying, saying that they were completely out of gas, no one would help them out, and that they were only two hours away from their destination. They looked younger than my kids, and it turns out that they were only 19, traveling across country for the first time to see some childhood friends. They begged for just one gallon of gas, enough to get to a town with more people where they might be able to get more help. I told them that I had no cash and explained about my special credit card. Asking them to follow me to our only gas station, I used the credit card to fill up their tank. They were very grateful and extremely relieved. The cost? $36. The next day, one of our church members saw me at daily Mass. This church member told me that she really needed some copies of my Blest Atheist book immediately. (I keep 8-10 books on hand at all times, just in case, and I get them at author's discount.) Once she had paid me for the books and I had ordered the replacements at author's discount, my "profit" was exactly $36, just enough to pay the credit card bill.

The Limit Increases
I have no doubt that God likes to use that credit card. Credit limit is no problem, but I was a bit worried when the bank automatically raised the limit to $4500. Yikes! What might God have in mind, I wondered? I have not been presented with situations requiring that high an infusion of cash, but I have had situations where the card funded hundreds of dollars, and in one case, $1300, all of which was paid off within a month. How that happens is one of those mysteries I may never figure out.

In one case, where someone needed a ticket for evangelical work in Texas, using my frequent flier miles, I was able to get him a first class roundtrip ticket for just $35, the cost being for the telephonic, last-minute transaction. I used God's credit card to pay for it. Then I settled down to work on bills since it was payday. As I worked through the budget, I found a $35 bill that I had planned to pay that day that I had already paid! I think it is fair to count those found dollars as payment for the $35 I owed on God's credit card.

In another case, I had charges of nearly $300 on the card and no particular income in sight. That was before lunch at a local restaurant with a visiting team of scholars from the University of California at Berkeley. The head of the team had wanted to get my input on a grant project about which I do have some unique expertise. Free lunch with great company at my favorite upscale restaurant constituted excellent payment for an afternoon of idea sharing, I thought. However, as the team was preparing to leave, the admin assistant asked me for my mailing address in order to send me my $500 honorarium!

Mary
"Go dancing tonight," the doctor told me at the end of my appointment. Yes, he wanted some more tests, but in general he agrees with me that I have been blessed with better health than my attention to taking care of myself deserves. So, I went dancing. Well, not literally dancing, but the effect was the same.

Donnie and I decided to grab a Subway sandwich and take it back home to San Ignatio (which has no fast food joints). We had some new movies from Netflix that had arrived in the mail and decided that after a hard week we deserved a relaxing evening at home. But first, we were to be given a chance to take care of one of God's children.

When we arrived at Subway, we encountered a girl in her early twenties who asked us for a dollar. Well, being a mother, I have to know some things from kids in their twenties.

"What do you need it for?" I asked.

"Food," she replied.

Ah, in that case, I had a better solution than a dollar bill. I handed her one of my $10 McDonald cards that I carry around for panhandlers asking for a meal when I do not have time to accompany them somewhere where we can use God’s credit card. She could buy a couple meals with that. She thanked me and seemed sincere about it.
As Donnie and I stood in line, we had second thoughts. McDonald's was on the other side of town, and here we were at a place selling food. For heaven's sake, we could buy her a meal on the spot and not make her trek somewhere else. Then she would have the McDonald’s card for a meal the next day.

So, I went back outside to talk to the young lady. She had started to walk off, ostensibly to go to McDonald's. "Excuse me," I called after her. "What's your name?"
She approached me. "Mary," she answered. Now there's a name that makes you think twice!

"Well, Mary, would you let us buy you a meal?" I asked.

She agreed with a wide smile, and in we went. We talked about the kinds of sandwiches we wanted while waiting in line, and she seemed a little awkward. That made sense, I thought. She did not know us. However, the real reason soon came to light.

"I don't know how to ask this," she started, then continued. "I feel guilty about accepting a meal for myself and then going home to my hungry family. I was trying to collect money to buy food for them all. Could I get something for them, too?"

"Of course. How many of them are there?" I asked.

"Six," she responded. "Two children, my mother, my sister, and my brother-in-law, besides me."

"Okay," I told her. "We can manage that." Of course, we could manage that. I had God's credit card with me.

Mary excused herself briefly to use the bathroom. The lady in front of us in line had overheard everything and suggested that we save money by getting three footlongs that were cut in half. That way it would only be $15 and would still be enough for six people. I considered it briefly and decided to leave that decision to God. It was, after all, God’s credit card.

Mary came back just in time to order. She immediately asked for four footlongs and two children's meals. As she darted back and forth between the person handling the bread and meat and the person handling the toppings, I remembered so many times doing the same thing with our kids. Sometimes, I had ordered as many as ten, depending upon who was home at the time. It was always quite an experience for the sandwich makers when my family came to dinner or I stopped by to bring them home. I got involved in the information passing to the sandwich makers, helping Mary. What joy! What fun! It was just like the old days, and for a brief few minutes, through Mary, it was like being back with my kids in younger years and reminded me of what Meister Eckhart said in Sermon Six: “People ought to give joy to the angels and the saints . . . Every saint has such great delight and such unspeakable joy from every good work . . . no tongue can tell, no heart can think how great is the joy they have from this.” Watching Mary, I began to understand just a little Meister Eckhart’s words.

Finally done, we packed up all the sandwiches, chips, drinks, and headed out the door. "How far do you have to walk?" I asked Mary, eyeing her multiple bags.

"Oh, I live nearby," she said. "Near the dollar store."

"That's more than a mile away!" I protested. "We will drive you."

So, we drove her there, talking along the way about her family, current situation, boyfriend—and the, yikes, fact that she might be pregnant.

"Okay," Donnie, now the dad again, brought up. "How are you going to feed the baby?"

"Well, if I am pregnant, my boyfriend has agreed to pay for the baby and get married. He has a job."

That seems like a backward way to do things, but I guess modern days are different from the days in which we grew up. Nonetheless, both Donnie and I slipped right back into the parent role, discussing the implications of these kinds of things. She accepted our words even though we were not her parents. Somehow, it just all seemed natural.

All too soon, we arrived and let her out. She started to walk away, then set down her bags and came back to me as I was about to get back into the car after helping her with the bags. She reached out and gave me a big hug and smile. "Thanks," she said. And that was it. Indeed, I had followed the doctor's orders. I went dancing—but not in the literal sense.

God’s Bank Account
I love having God’s credit card. It has given me many opportunities to help people that I could not otherwise have done! In addition to the examples above and the people who stray onto my path from time to time, we have used the credit card in our prayer group as a way of providing larger amounts of help to individuals who come to our attention than any one of us individually would be able to do. Always, the card gets paid off within the month. I get some unexpected royalties; another member receives an unexpected monetary gift from a relative; a third earns extra money on a one-time job that comes along. We don’t hesitate to use the card because we know it will get paid off.

Recently, we have started talking about several of us together opening a bank account for God. That way, if people get some unexpected funds that they want to use for credit card payment, they can put it into the bank upfront where it can earn interest until we need to make a purchase with the card, at which time the funds will be ready to pay off the card. Of course, if it is not enough, we can still trust God to find the funds to keep the card paid. Now, I wonder how the teller will react when we tell her whose account we want to open.

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Excerpted from A Believer in Waiting's First Encounters with God (forthcoming), copyright 2011.

Bad Things and Good People

Note: This piece was published in Blest Atheist in part and excerpted here a couple of years ago in part. Since then, I have given much more thought to the question why bad things happen to good people, mainly because the question is raised so often by the high school kids in my catechism class. The fuller analysis of my demand to God upon coming to faith to know why my children were born with birth defects if there were a God who could have prevented but chose not to is provided below and will appear in my forthcoming book, A Believer in Waiting's First Encounters with God.

Read the Book of Job! More than a thought but less than a voice, the words slammed into my consciousness in a manner I found four years later described in Jeremiah: “Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, like a hammer shattering rocks?” (Jer 23:29). I accepted these quiet but compelling words at face value and then surprised myself by following them instinctively, without examination.

While the response to my question came immediately, the answer took days to understand. I knew that Job was somewhere in the Old Testament. I found a Bible on line and read the pages.

On first reading, the meaning of Job escaped me. Well, there is the expression, the “patience of Job,” but I did not think that the message I was supposed to be getting had anything to do with patience. After all, how does lack of patience explain why children might be born with handicaps?

So, I read the Book of Job again. I read about all the torments and testing, about how Job remained faithful through all the tests. I did not think that was the message I was supposed to be getting, either. That, too, did not explain why my children would be born with handicaps. My children are not torments. They are delights.

So, I read the Book of Job a third time, paying attention to how Job’s friends exhorted him to turn his back on God, but instead he turned his back on their advice. This, too, did not seem to be the message I was supposed to be getting for I had neither blamed God nor believed in God at the time of my children’s births. It seemed I would need the proverbial patience of Job to ferret out whatever message I was supposed to be getting.

So, I read the Book of Job a fourth time and began to feel much empathy for him, especially in the loss of his children. I noted well that I had been spared such pain even in the case of Doah, whose first two years took the form of a dance between life and death and life again. An understanding was beginning to emerge but not one that I could articulate. Just one more time and perhaps I would understand!

I read the Book of Job a fifth time, and then I finally got it. It was not the concept of patience that I needed to understand, nor was it a test whose requirements I needed to meet. No, it was the concept of agape (unconditional love) that I needed to develop. No matter what was taken from Job or what he had to endure, he continued to love God. What the message of Job said to me at that time is that God's presence in our lives and what happens to us and those we care about are separate things. God has promised to be with us if we allow it. What happens to us, on the other hand, is often a result of free will with which God does not usually interfere. My children’s birth defects, in a parallel way, were an unfortunate combination of genes, resulting from the free will of two people who chose each other as marital partners. Even with the animal kingdom, God allows genetics free play. God could have chosen to intervene but did not do so. There likely are reasons for every bad thing that befalls us where God does not intervene, and there likely are reasons for my children’s birth defects. Certainly, my being unaware of the reasons does not mean that they do not exist. Just as likely, were I aware of them, I might not understand them. Scripture tells us that God’s thinking is as far above ours as the sky is from the earth. The reasons, in any case, are irrelevant. Our love of God must be as unconditional as is God’s love for us. What happens in life—the bad things and the good things—cannot be conditions for whether or not we love God. They are tangential. I understood that God was not to blame for any of the bad things that happened to Job or to me, but God has been omnipotent at turning the bad, once it happened, into good.

The reading of Job began to answer my question as to why God could exist and not intervene or why it might even be better to allow the birth defects to occur, as counterintuitive as the latter may sound. My children’s value is not defined by their birth defects but by what they do with their lives, how they help others, what they contribute to the world, i.e., not by what they cannot do but rather but what they can do and do do.

There was one more thing. God protected Job. It did not seem that way to Job because Job was not in on the agreement that God had made with Satan. Satan could take things away from Job and then, later, God even allowed Satan to torment Job physically. Job, however, was never in danger of dying. His life was always in God’s hands as so many times have been my life and the lives of my children when I, like Job, could not see what was transpiring.

As I came to know God better, I began to understand the story of Job in new ways. One important thing that I now understand that would have made no sense in the beginning of my walk with God is that God does not owe us anything. God does not owe us a life without trouble. God does not owe us peace and tranquility. God does not owe us intervention at any particular point in our lives or at all. God sometimes assuages our pain because God wants to. That assuaging is an act of grace, not an entitlement.

C. S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain) points out that we would not ever expect pain to be assuaged were we not to believe in a loving God. It is the concept of a loving God that creates the “problem of pain” for us because we assume that a loving God would not want us ever to feel any pain. I now understand, however, that any assumption that it is God’s will that our lives be free of hassle, pain, and even death is a wrong assumption. When we assume that a loving God would want to heal us of all our illnesses, prevent the loss of our relatives at too early an age, or destroy all our enemies, we fail to understand that every intervention, every assistance, every gift is a grace. Our God-given compassion for our fellow man tells us that human intervention is good. Perhaps that is our basis for assuming that God’s intervention would be good, but we are not privy to the kinds of knowledge that God has. Nor are we capable of seeing and understanding the human condition in the way that God does. We are told in the New Testament that the way of the cross is both necessary and good, and St. Pio specifically points to this way as essential to our spiritual development: “In order to grow, we need hard bread: the cross, humiliation, trials, and denials.” Yet, it is the way of the cross that we attempt to avoid when we demand to know why bad things happen to good people. Might it not be arrogant to believe that any one of us should be exempt from the pain and suffering that comprises the human condition? I would posit that we don’t deserve children without birth defects. We have not earned a right to no pain. Rather, as St. Paul told the Ephesians, “we are all by nature deserving of wrath” (Ephesians 2:3). Some may experience little pain, thanks to God’s mercy. Others may experience much pain, also thanks to God’s mercy. I did not come to understand this continuum of mercy until I had passed through a series of metanoias.

Further, simply by asking the question why God would allow us to experience pain, we separate ourselves from God — another understanding that took a long time to settle in among my logic-driven neurons. Bonaventure suggests that God does not observe our suffering from afar but rather suffers with us from within, that out of an abundance of love, God is drawn to those who suffer. In one of my favorite books, The Humility of God, Ilia Delio beautifully provides a touching description of this co-suffering:

Suffering is . . . the place of transformation. It is a door by which God can enter in and love us where we are. . . As Clare of Assisi realized, God bends down in the cross to share our tears out of a heart full of mercy and love . . .

The power of God is the powerlessness of God’s unconditional love shown to us in the cross. God is the beggar who will not force his way into our homes unless we open the door. . . . God shares in the brokenness of the world out of the abundance of divine love.

Suffering, then, perhaps should be welcomed. “Tribulation is a gift God gives us,” St. Thomas More tells us, “one that he especially gives his special friends.” St. Rose of Lima concurs, “Without the burden of afflictions, it is impossible to reach the height of grace. The gift of grace increases as the struggle increases.”

Was my question answered? Not completely. I still did not know for certain why God intervened to save my children’s lives but not to prevent their birth defects. I have come, however, to understand that knowing is not important; trusting without knowing is paramount. Knowing can be detrimental to a relationship with God. One could take the Israelites as an archetype in this respect. When God let them know things more fully, they turned away from God. Likewise, when Adam and Eve began to know, they strayed. So, I accept not knowing as an inherent condition for real trust, a strong relationship, and deep conversion.

In his homily recently, a visiting priest told the story of three people who went to learn from a guru. The guru asked them why they had come to him. One replied that he had heard of the guru through local people and wanted to learn from such an august man. The guru sent him away. The second replied that she had looked around to see who could teach her what she wanted to learn and in this way had discovered the existence of the guru. He sent her away. The third stammered out that he really did not know how he had heard about the guru or what he really wanted to learn. The guru replied, “You’ll do.”

Clearly, to the guru, not knowing was not only acceptable but also desirable. Some day, if I continue to accept the not-knowing part of my relationship with God, perhaps I, too, will hear the words, “You’ll do.”

I like to think that perhaps this is what happened in the case of my children. Perhaps God looked for parents who would love them just the way they are and fight for them to be everything they could be without questioning the reason for their infelicitous combination of genes and said, “they’ll do.” I like to think that even though I was an atheist and Donnie an agnostic, God thought that we just might do.

God entrusted some very special people to us: children with wide smiles, great love for people, and needs that have allowed people with whom they have come into contact to help them in ways that have been mutually rewarding. Because of their ability to bring smiles to others, I call our children God’s rainbow makers. Just like a broken sprinkler gushes more water onto a parched field, God’s rainbow makers sprinkle more water onto parched souls. The thought that God blessed and entrusted me with these rainbow makers entered my head only after a very long pondering of the experience of Job. Realizing the extent of God’s trust in me has engendered within me a reciprocal trust in God.

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Excerpted from A Believer in Waiting's First Encounters with God (forthcoming), copyright 2011.

Finding Doah

My continuing apologies for not being able to deal with graphics on this old computer--my laptop is STILL in computer repair land on the East Coast, and I am told that those experts have not yet figured out the problem nor made a decision what to do. In the interim, Word does work, and so I am hard at work on my next book, in and around travels and real work. I have completed six of nine chapters, and chapter seven is nearly done. As promised, here is an excerpt. It is a just-finished section of chapter 7, which I will post on all my blogs for which the topic is pertinent.

As a child and through his teenage years, Doah had a habit of slinking off, mainly from curiosity or because he wanted to go somewhere and there was no one to take him at precisely the time he wanted to go. It was not the kind of disappearance that a fully mentally competent child of the same age would make. Rather, it was a matter of marrying “want” with “immediate fulfillment” prompted by naivete and complete trust in the safety and kindness of the surrounding environment associated with the simplicity of mental retardation. Usually, we would find Doah a couple of aisles away in the grocery store, in the backyard on the swings, or at a neighbor’s house. Scarier disappearances, however, did occur, like the time he decided to walk down the middle of Lee Highway, the main thoroughfare in Arlington, Virginiua.

One Sunday morning when Doah was twelve years old but the size of a seven-year-old and with the mental age of a seven year old, I emerged from the shower and could not find him. I checked the entire house. No Doah. I checked the backyard. Empty swings. I checked with the all the neighbors. No visit to their homes that day. Frantic panic set up, and I began walking the streets in our subdivision, calling his name. Neighbors I had never before met told me that they knew Doah. Really? He had been wandering farther afield than I had known. When? I suppose I will never know the answer to that question. At the time, though, I was more interested in how far his wandering might have taken him. I returned home to Donnie empty-handed.

“Why are you losing time by walking all over the neighborhood?” he asked me. “Just think where he is.”

“Thinking” actually referred to what I often knew about my children from unexplainable sources. For example, I occasionally “knew” in advance that one or another would get hurt at school that day, creating a dilemma in that I had no way to tell a teacher to be careful and try to prevent the accident. No teacher would believe me, yet each time the child in question in woulds indeed return home with some minor injury. If I were sitting quietly, thinking about nothing at all, sometimes an image would appear of the child, either where the child was at the moment or what would happen to the child in the immediate future.

“Nothing comes to mind about Doah,” I told Donnie.

“Just calm down and think for a minute,” Donnie advised.

I emptied my mind and, blast!, in came an image of Doah, clothed in white with a blue belt. He was standing, surrounded by white. White everywhere. Well, one can imagine the worst possible scenario from that.

“I think he’s dead,” I told Donnie. “Everything around him is white.”

“What else?” Donnie pressed, knowing that I am one to miss details. “There has to be more. What is he doing? Is he saying anything? Is there anyone else there?”

Ah! I could not see whether or not there was anyone else there, but he was standing and clapping! Clapping? Church!

Although Donnie was agnostic and I atheist, we did allow our children to attend church services if they wished. Doah had taken up recently with a church downtown, about a mile from where we lived. He would get there by bus, or someone would pick him up. If the latter, the van driver would always come to our door, and that had not happened this time. Still, I knew Doah was at the church.

Donnie and I drove to the church apprehensively. What if he were not there? Then what?

I walked in the door and immediately knew I was in the right place. The inside of the church had been painted—all white. I wandered through one of the rooms, heard some singing, and moved in that direction. As I turned the corner, I saw another white-walled room, and there in the front row was Doah, standing and clapping, dressed in white clothes, with his blue money belt around his waist. Thank God!

I do not know how to interpret these out-of-the-ordinary experiences in my past. I find it hard to believe that such “help” would come from something demonic. Yet, clearly most parents do not find their missing children by emptying their minds and allowing an image of the location of their children to enter. In some ways, these images presaged how nowadays I approach contemplative prayer. Perhaps back then they reflected God’s way of dealing with an atheist in the only way she would (or could) accept.

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Excerpted from Believer in Waiting (forthcoming), copyright 2003.