And then Sophy found out that her Bible study group leader was not just any Ginny, but Hattie’s friend Ginny! Not that Sophy guessed, Ginny was the one who asked, quiet-like, “Aren’t you Hattie’s new neighbor?” And when Sophy said yes, Ginny said she had kind of thought so, and that she had been sending a car for her for some time, and had been filled with gladness when she heard that Sophy had finally started to use it.
“You sent the car?” said Sophy.
And Ginny said yes, and smiled, and said, “Of course, you didn’t have to use it. But I knew you would someday.”
And when Sophy asked how she knew, Ginny said she just knew. “Don’t you ever have things you just know?” she asked. And when Sophy said she couldn’t think of one, Ginny said that if Sophy ever did, she should write it down and tell her. And Sophy laughed and said okay, she would write it down. And Ginny said if it wasn’t a Bible study day, she could still find her in church. “Do you know where the church is?” she asked. And when Sophy said, “In the living room?” Ginny laughed as if Sophy had said something funny. “Yes,” she said. “It used to be down in the basement, but we’ve grown so big, we had to put an addition onto the living room. Now it’s right down the hall. Have you been there?” And when Sophy said no, because she thought it was for Sundays, Ginny said, “Well, I go there pretty much every day just to sit and pray. It’s been the saving of me. So when you think of something you just know, you can come have a look there.” And Sophy said, “Okay.”
It’s been the saving of me
.
Sophy didn’t go right away. Like she couldn’t think of something she just knew. But then one day she went to take a look, and as soon as she walked in, she did know something. Like as soon as she walked in she knew she just wanted to sit there and look up at the windows so bad, and maybe Gift knew she wanted that too, because he was quiet for a change. So quiet, that she could actually sit down with him in her lap for a few minutes, and let him play with her buttons and put his fingers in her mouth while she looked around. Probably if anyone had asked her before that whether she cared about rooms and whether they could change her being, she would have said no, especially since she had never even thought before about whether she had a being. But sitting there, she suddenly knew that she did, she had one, and that it was being changed. It was. The church wasn’t fancy. But she loved the windows all around, and she loved the mural up front with, like, these purple-blue mountains dipping down to a bright bright river that wound around to a big glowing cross. She loved the airiness of the space too, and she loved it that it wasn’t crammed full of gold statues. Like she loved it that there wasn’t incense burning and making her cough, and that it wasn’t full of Cambodian women afraid of
k’maoch
either. It was different here. Like everyone at the temple in her old town was suffering so bad inside, but couldn’t do anything but suffer and be good and wait for their next life, while here, people were being reborn, like, right away! In this life! They didn’t have to build up their good karma little by little, never knowing if they’d built up enough. They could be saved today, all they had to do was accept that Christ had died for their sins. And that was it! In fact, there wasn’t anything else a person could do, really—they couldn’t save themselves, no matter what they did. Because that’s what it said in Ephesians, that no amount of good deeds would help, that people are saved by faith, and faith alone. So that, like, the only thing that would work was accepting Christ’s sacrifice and love. Which was hard for Sophy to really get, in the beginning. Like it almost seemed like cheating.
But that’s why the Bible was called Good News! And it wasn’t even in, like, one passage in the Bible, it was in a million of them. How the Lord knew everything about you, like your downsitting and your uprising and all your thoughts and ways to begin with, and how He didn’t look on outward appearances, but on the heart. So that you didn’t have to undo anything bad you’d done, you just had to be truly sorry. Like King David had an affair with Bathsheba, and before he repented, all he could do was groan and lose weight. But once he repented, God forgave him just like that! Just like that, his transgression was removed as far as the east is from the west, and he wasn’t the only one who started all over. Paul did too, and a lot of other people. They were all reborn in Christ, Ginny said, as they had to be, because new wine needs new bottles. Then she asked if people knew other people who had been born again, and they all did, except Sophy. And that was embarrassing until she remembered that her dad had been reborn, in a way—not into a brand-new life, but into his brother’s life—and that his first wife had sort of been reborn out of the mud, but then died. She didn’t really expect them to care, but they listened like it was the most interesting thing they’d ever heard, and finally someone asked if she wanted to be reborn like them, or in a different way. And when she said in a different way, they cheered, and when Ginny said, “It says in John 3:3, ‘Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God,’ ” Sophy started crying. Because she did so want to be reborn. She wanted to be reborn into the right life, her real life. Her old life was just so wrong.
“I don’t know why I was born,” she said. “I am so ashamed. Sometimes I think I should kill myself.”
She couldn’t believe those words came out of her, but they did, and what happened next was, like, even more unbelievable. Because right then and there Ginny made everyone bow their head and pray for Sophy.
“She is crying out like Jonah, Lord, she is crying out of the belly of hell!” said Ginny. “Hear her! Hear her!”
And they all held hands and prayed that God would hear her, and when Ginny asked Sophy if she felt the power of that, she said yes, because she had. It was like having her sisters back, she wasn’t alone anymore.
A
couple of weeks later, the church had this special camp meeting like they did every year. They got together with two other independent churches, and rented a campground, and organized all kinds of special things. Like they had activities and food, and were giving out devotional books for free. Sophy couldn’t go for the whole time, but she came for some of it, and brought Gift, who loved the children’s group. And she loved everything!—starting with how you crossed this little bridge over a stream to get to the campground, and how the first thing you heard was the ringing of a bell to call people to service. She loved the Ping-Pong tables and the dining room and the first-aid building, and she loved the smell of the barbecues and the pines. The pines were these big round trunks rising right up out of the ground, with nothing else growing around them—like the floor of the forest was all just clear and open and bouncy with pine needles. And the meeting hall was cool too, this big huge building, with enormous flap doors on three sides of it. The doors were propped open on poles, so that they made these covered entrances that made you feel like you were going inside, except that inside still felt like outside because there were so many doors, and what walls there were had these big windows. There was a pop-up in the middle of the roof too, with windows all around it, so that the light just poured in, and you could feel Jesus looking down. And everything was, like, old. Like the wood and the windows with their little panes were old, and the organ and piano up front on kind of this open stage were old too. There was a big plain cross just standing up there by itself, and a long long altar, kind of like an eternal bench, along the whole front of the hall. And there were these huge hangings with quotations from Galatians and Hebrews that looked like they had been there for even longer than the pine trees outside, and were going to be there until the end of the earth. Of course, there were some new things too, like a projection screen and a computer, and a tilted table with buttons and lights for the sound system. But everything else was old, even the hymnbooks piled up at the end of the pews were old. It was cool.
Sophy loved it that there were all these strangers mixed up with people she knew, because somehow that made it even more special to see Kate and Simone and Renee, like they were old friends. Renee was having trouble with her knee, like don’t you know it would be God’s plan for her to tear her meniscus, she said, complaining-like. But Kate and Simone and Sophy helped her around and brought her drinks and carried her backpack, and that made her feel better. And Sophy loved that as much as Kate, probably, she loved being able to help a friend. The four of them sat together through the songs and announcements, and through some sermonizing Sophy didn’t understand but didn’t mind listening to because it was nice to be sitting there in this big open space with the ceiling fans going, and because it was fun hearing other people sighing and saying Amen to things even if it wasn’t their turn to talk, and because the preacher told a lot of funny stories about bad things he’d done, and what Jesus had said to him to straighten him out. The preacher wasn’t from their church and didn’t look like much, just a normal guy walking back and forth with brown hair and a mike in his hand like someone on TV. He had these big half-moons of sweat under his arms even though no one else was sweating, and that was weird, because it was warm out, but not really that hot, and that kind of made you want to laugh at him in a way. But no one did laugh at him, because they liked the stories, even though every one of them started with something like skipping Bible study because of the World Series, and every one of them led to “And Jesus said to me, Bill …” They were all the same, but you really did get the feeling that Jesus talked right to him like that, and that maybe you could get Jesus to talk to you like that too. And that kept you interested, like his sermon, which started out pretty bleak with Job 18, but went on to talk about different kinds of hope and how hope was usually a good thing, but could be a bad thing if it made us blind, like if it blinded us to the difference between a trial and a chastisement, for example. Like if it meant we just started blindly hoping God was going to work everything out for us, and if as a result we failed to change when God was telling us to change. And he talked about how we should welcome chastisement, painful as it was, because it was God’s message to us, and because it was a form of love.
“For as the Bible says in Hebrews 12:7, ‘What son is he whom the father chastiseth not?’ ” he said. “The Lord only chastises those He sees as His children. The Lord only chastises those who are His chosen. But you know, the chastisement is lost unless we learn from it—unless we learn the lesson He is trying, in His great love, to teach us. The chastisement is lost unless we try to understand what we need to do to get right with God. And that is why I ask you now to look in your hearts, and to think whether God has chastised you in any way. I ask you to look in your hearts and ask if He’s been trying to tell you something, if He’s been trying to teach you. And if He has, I ask you to embrace that, and to turn to the Lord our God now—to embrace the only hope which is true hope, namely the hope in God. In Hebrews 12:1, Paul tells us, ‘seeing … we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight’—and so let us do that—let us now lay aside every weight. Compassed about with our own great cloud of witnesses, let us now accept the Lord’s chastisement and lay our weight aside.”
And then this music started and the preacher started calling people up to the altar in the front of the hall, and for a moment nobody went. And that was embarrassing because who would, like, just walk up there in front of everybody? But first a few people started going up, and then a lot of people, and pretty soon it seemed just, like, normal for Sophy to help Renee get up there, and then to stay herself, even though she’d never done it before. Because there were all kinds of people up there, men and women, young and old, a lot of them with their heads buried in their hands, and the preacher wasn’t telling funny stories anymore.
“Are you carrying a weight just like Paul was talking about?” he was saying, his voice all, like, big and rolling and coming from all around you. “Are you carrying a weight you would like to set down? Can you feel it there on your shoulders, if you reach back can you feel it in the muscles of your neck, do you just know it’s there, all the time, something you’re so used to you don’t even think about it as a weight, something you might even forget about during the day, but that rises up to torment you the minute the busyness lets up? It’s something that haunts you, something you can’t escape. You turn a corner, and there it is, and you turn another corner, and there it is again. Your torment. Your chastisement. It’s something you’ve tried to hide, something you’ve tried to deny, but that weighs you down and weighs you down, that causes you more pain than you think you can bear but that is just the Lord preparing you, really—preparing you for this moment, now, in this tent—helping you understand that this is what He wants from you, to come up here and lay your burden down. He wants you to lay it down so that you can feel hope again, the only true hope, which is hope in Jesus Christ. He wants you to lay it down so you can get right with the Lord. It’s what He wants, it’s what He’s trying to get you to do. So if you feel Jesus is speaking to you now, if you feel called to the altar, come up. Let the Lord enter you, come up. Come up.”
Sophy didn’t even realize until she got to the altar with Renee that she’d been carrying a weight around. And the first minute she was kneeling down, she didn’t realize it either. But once she kneeled a little longer, she suddenly realized that the preacher was talking to her special, inviting her special because he knew, he knew. “You’ve sinned,” he said. “And it weighs on you, doesn’t it. The knowledge. It weighs you down and sets you apart from others,” he said—and when he said that, she suddenly remembered what she did with Ronnie, and how she’d gotten pregnant, and how terrible that was, and how she didn’t have one person in the world she could tell, not even her sisters because she was so bad and it was so terrible. So that pretty soon she was crying like everyone else, remembering and crying, and just so glad when Ginny suddenly showed up and knelt down beside her, and put her hand on her back, and asked if she could pray alongside her. Because that was the first time she told anyone how her breasts had hurt so bad and how she had thrown up and thrown up, and how it was like she was possessed by the devil, how it was like the devil had entered her body, so that it wasn’t even hers anymore, it was the devil’s. She told Ginny how she got to be so tired she couldn’t keep her eyes open in school. And she told Ginny how on her second day in the foster home she woke up in a circle of blood—how everywhere there was just blood and blood and blood, and how she hoped it wasn’t going to, like, stain the sheets and how she was trying to figure out what to do except that she was cramping and cramping so she couldn’t think and couldn’t stand up, and how she wanted to call for help but didn’t want to call Wayne or Jane or Big Erica who she barely knew, and so how she just struggled to the bathroom alone and was just lucky it was empty, because it wasn’t always. And she told Ginny how she sat on the toilet then, while people came and knocked on the door and yelled but thank God went away to the other bathroom so she could at least sit there sweating and cramping by herself while these, like, huge bloody clumps came out of her, they were so big they kind of slid down to the bottom of the toilet bowl and piled up, she just hoped she didn’t see a baby down there. Which she definitely could, because it had been in her for, like, three months, she thought, or maybe longer, every day she had been trying to figure out how to get rid of it but didn’t know how, she just wished she would die. Like she wished her sisters or her parents or Ronnie or someone would come in and find her all by herself and dead, but not, like, with her pants down and her underwear dirty, and the linoleum floor all a mess. It was a long time. But after a while she finally got herself into the bathtub, and turned on the hot water, and closed her eyes so she couldn’t see the water all, like, red all around her, and her bloated body floating in the middle of it like one of the dead people in the water after the
Titanic
sank. Even now it makes her want to kill herself to think about sometimes, though sometimes it makes her take extra good care of Gift too.