How about you? She said. Do you believe in God?
I'm always amazed at how the mind can flash through a lifetimes worth of memories in just a few seconds. My answer came out after several awkward seconds (felt like minutes). And in the time it took between her question and my answer I thought of a bunch of (seemingly random) things... like...
my first kiss....
the time I pee'd my pants in right-field... (little league).
the day my father left....
But probably the most difficult thing was an unidentifiable thought splintered into a bunch of images...
a dark room... a bright distant light... running water.....
and then nothing.
blankness....
just an unnerving feeling of fear... and dread.
I have to admit that if God was all knowing (OMNIscient) all powerful (OMNIpotent)... and all the other OMNI's.... it didn't really make sense that everything was all so "fucked-up" like it was... (That's how he had said it).
My mind skipped again and conjured up an old conversation..
•
It was a few years ago and I was at work trying to get pain medicine for one of my patients. And then out of no where I heard him say... If there's a good God... Then why is it all so fucked-up?
He was angry, and he said it with a Manford twang... Okie-style.... like poke-salad and fried-potatoes with cornbread and beans. His name was Scott and he was a redneck (..... and he was in a bad mood).
When I first met Scott, he was scary... with a thick, scraggly beard.... like a mountain man in the movie "Deliverance".
It always seemed to me that he was a walking contradiction. A nurse by trade but overly concerned with masculinity....
(as a man?... you gotta know who you are before entering the nursing world....).
* He liked to randomly grab dudes from the hall and arm wrestle them like he were wrestling wild pigs... as if in some perverse way he had something to prove.
The only time Scott had ever talked to me about God before was when he had told me that if there was a God that it was probably a big, giant, space-alien like the one on the TV show Stargate.... Just a creature like us... But more evolved... bigger and smarter than us....
In the med room, he had just got off the phone with his wife. There was evidently some kind of crap he was dealing with but he didn't want to talk about it. Instead he wanted to talk about God.
•
I put my hand up... and gestured for him to wait a moment... (told him... I'll be back), and went to give my patient her pain medicine. When I walked into her room... I saw how sick she was. Jaundiced pumpkin orange. Her hair was still unshaved... in sparse strands from the Chemo.
As I gave her the drug she became more cheerful.
"I get my results back today", she had said. (She was talking about her bone marrow results.... She had Leukemia).
We'll certainly hope for the best, I had said to her... (I said it from a thick, safe distance... I didn't like to get too close to patients). She smiled at me through reddened... ulcerated lips.
•
When I returned to Scott, I gave him answers to his question. They were good answers. Smart answers. I talked about free will and how God doesn't want a planet of robots, and I said things like "the crap in this world isn't God's fault.... It's our fault".
But as I was saying it, I was thinking that some crap that happened in the world was pretty bad crap. And I thought about a young preteen girl who had recently made headline news when she was abducted on video by a man in broad daylight.
It's not God's fault... I had said to Scott, it's ours; and I remembered how I had prayed for the safety of that girl... almost like a test. "If you're real God... then save this girl", I had said. And I remembered how I had awakened the next day to more headline news and the discovery of the girls body. And I thought of her family and the desperate pleas and prayers made on her behalf, and the hopes of an intervening God who might swoop down and rescue her as sometimes it appeared that he did with others.
I continued to talk to Scott... "Sometimes in God's providence.... he allows evil for the greater purpose of the forthcoming good", I said... But as I said it I was thinking that maybe we were all alone in the world... And I thought that if God existed, I wondered where he was... And I wondered what he was thinking and what he was doing. And sometimes.. I wondered if he was even listening to us at all.
•
Julia was waiting across the table for my response... but to be honest... in that moment I didn't know what I believed. It was like the next thing from my mouth would be my own ritual... a confession of faith (or doubt)... and as I tried to answer her, I felt myself slipping from my seat, out into the hall, and out the door.... Holden Caufield-style.... but then my mind flashed again with that same unidentifiable image...
a dark room.... a bright.. distant light... the sound of running water...
and then the awful feeling of pain... doubt... and fear....
and then nothing else. (Part 3 to come)...
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