Church

When I was a little girl, I always wanted to go to church. Oh, we did the occasional Easter, me and my sister dressed in finery and lacy socks with black patent leather shoes, the boys uncomfortable in suits and clip on ties with shoes they would outgrow before the day was over.

When we moved, the summer after 6th grade, we moved to a house. Across the street from that house was a church. We never visited that church. I wanted to, longed to. On the times I actually woke up early on Sunday, I would sit and watch all the people go in. I was doing two forbidden things. Sitting in the living room and longing for church when it was not welcomed in our house.

I don't know if church began to grow in my mind from there. As I grew older and treasured my sleep, I was glad that we didn't do anything like that. When I could hide in bed reading on a Sunday afternoon instead of sweating it out in a service that didn't end until 3pm, I was grateful for our stance.

When I was 17, something happened. I don't know what happened, but suddenly, we were going to church. We went to the church that my dad's family had gone to for so long. Initially, we were welcomed with open arms. I approached church the same way I approached school. Learn as much as possible. Know more than anybody else. After all, this Bible was simply a book and what did I know better than anyone at my school? Books. So, in Sunday School, I knew every answer, read every assignment. Nothing was esoteric. Everything had a right or wrong answer. We played Bible Jeopardy and no one wanted to play against me, except the foolish people who had once dominated or the older people who thought they knew. They didn't know me. I won. I always won. Mothers wanted their daughters to look up to me. Mothers wanted their sons to marry me. I was a paragon and I was a fraud.

The day I was baptized, dressed in the white clothes, a towel over my hair, making a public statement that I had accepted Jesus into my heart, I was fervently praying that I had, in fact, accepted Christ into my heart. I took my dunking with grace, eyes closed, breath held, praying that when I came up, I would be different.

I was not. Everyone cheered and I went on perpetuating the fraud. And the more of a fraud I was, the more I saw it in others around me. We knew what we were doing. We were pretenders. We didn't know what else to do. We understood the Bible, we understood what had to happen, we just didn't know how it would happen to us. We holed up in our enclave of intellectual belief, hoping that one day, the love of Christ would grow in our hearts and we set to work convincing ourselves that, in fact, it had.

It would be two years before I actually understood what it meant to be saved.