The Door Girl, Part 26

I am ten-years old and our church is having a revival. I am in fifth grade. We watch videos of dead babies in the streets and people disappearing mid-walk with a friend. The song from the video is “You’ve been left behind.”

I get home from school and the house is empty. Logically, I know that my mother is at work, but all I can think about is that song. And I know that I have been left behind. That all the good people were taken, my mother along with them, and I did not make the cut.

My mother comes home and plops her purse down on the table. “Hey kiddo, good day?”

“Uh-huh,” I say, my heart beating a million miles a minute. “Hey ma?”

“Yes?”
“What if I don’t believe in God or any of that stuff they teach at church?” I ask her fearing for my life.

“Baby,” she says calmly, “you just gotta fake it till ya make it. That’s what you do in this life.”

And I did it well. Until, I didn’t.        

Guarding the Stone

Time.  It's all we have and yet never have enough.

We rush trying to pack in a million things and are blinded to the holiness that surrounds us.  

The wonders of the everyday.  The divine conversations we take part in day after day--all heavenly.

There's a pin ball machine banging in the background.  A baby playing.  And the holy rosary being prayed both on the television and in my head.

I stop.  Slow.  Listen.  I breathe in holiness and deliberate how to seal it in--like the stone rolled in front of the tomb.  

And yet like the body of Jesus disappearing, the peace inevitably finds a way to escape.  The one guarding the stone falls asleep at least twenty times a day.

A type of sleep apnea of the soul, I presume.

Racked sleep and cessation of breathing in holiness.

Today, I fight to stay awake.  To keep watch over the stone.  To seal in those things that are good and Spirit-filled.

Things that are divine, barely spoken, beautiful.  

I hide them in my heart and stand guard.