Heather Anne

[This is a repost for some of you. For others of you, it's brand new.]

Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel
to go through the eye of a needle than
for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
- Matthew 19:24

I was twelve years old when the sign-up sheet for church camp came my way, and without pause—like a game of holy hot potato—I passed it left to Jennifer Jones. I couldn't understand for the life of me why God was trying to ruin my life with church. Outside of church was Creation: climbing trees and wading creeks and lightning bugs for catching. Inside of church was talk of plagues, and lakes of fire, and even a guy who tied up his own kid for sacrificing. And, sure, that was unfortunate, but my favorite comic book was Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and readers had just voted to kill off Robin. So an outbreak of toads on some long gone Egyptians wasn't exactly what you'd call traumatizing. The worst part of church was repentance, which is a lot like saying sorry, but that's just half the battle. Genuine repentance is apologizing and vowing to turn from your evil ways. I was sorry for nearly everything I did wrong, especially when I got caught. But promising to never pinch my sister in her armpit again? It's like those people who really believed Catwoman could stop being a villain just because Batman loved her.

I was about ready to give up on God completely when my Sunday School teacher said something ridiculous. It started out regular: "God wants you to talk to him." And ended with a bang: "You can ask God for anything." I clarified this point twice. Anything? Yes. Anything? Yes. "And he wants you to be specific. Pray early," she said. "Pray often!"

I was still a child, but I was no one's fool. When Softly and Tenderly started up on our rickety piano during that very morning's Invitation, I got to praying.

Dear God, I prayed in my own head (because that's how Hebrews said you should go about it), Please get me a new bike. I would like a green Huffy with handlebar brakes, not sissy back pedal brakes. I would like knobby tires like the ones on my friends' bikes. It's hard enough being the only girl in the neighborhood without having white tires. Plus my dad says it is too expensive to replace those tires because you have to buy them at a special store. So black tires, please. Or, here's another idea: make K-Mart stock white knobby tires. I'll leave that up to you. I would like streamers for the handlebars, because being some girly is okay. Any other extras is fine, except a basket. Amen.

I was so happy to ask God for something real like a bike instead of food for orphans, and so overjoyed to have escaped another round of pretending to repent, and so excited that God wanted me to have my dream bike that I went ahead and signed up for church camp.

Because I was twelve years old, I had to go to church camp with the Youth Group. (Youth is Christian code for teenager.) We left for camp in the early morning, because in summer in Georgia, everything is a race against the sun. The design of our church van suggested that it had once been part of a great Smurf massacre, and that no one had ever paused to clean up the carnage. The outside of the van was Smurf-skin blue, with just the word "Baptist" painted on the side in a darker, more Smurf-guts blue. (I assumed there were other denominations of vans out there too, and that some weekends there were great demolition derbys, with "Baptists" and "Methodists" pitted against the "Catholics" and "Episcopalians.") The consoles of our church van were blue, the steering wheel was blue, the interior carpet was blue, the ceiling was blue. Even the seats were blue, and made of vinyl, and if you wore shorts your best bet was to just Stay Still, because sun fuses skin and vinyl together and if you move around, something is going to peel off. It may be your skin or it may be the vinyl. There's really no way of knowing.

Jennifer Jones was the only other girl my age, but she preferred to hang out with the older girls in the back of the van, talking about makeup and kissing boys and who knows what all kinds of debauchery. I was fine by myself. I had already learned that God liked suffering—Paul, his favorite servant, got walloped on a regular basis—so I planned to endure the week alone and spend every free moment praying for my new bike. There wasn't much else to do, I reckoned. All forms of secular entertainment including magazines and cassette tapes were expresly forbidden—a rule I never quite understood. The person who thought cable television was too intense for us had obviously never read the Old Testament.

On the ride to camp I tried not to think about the heat or about how my skin might be permanently attached to the seat or how someone else's skin might have been permanently attached to the seat and I might be sitting on top of it. Instead I imagined the post-camp awards ceremony, where I would surely be compensated for my piety. "This young lady has been praying for a bike for three entire weeks with no results," a camp counselor would say. "Let's give Heather a round of applause for keeping her faith in the face of such torment!" Then he would give me either a plaque that said "Way to Endure!" or a ribbon that said "God's #1 Sufferer." Everyone would cheer, and some people would probably even cry the way my mom did when missionaries came to my church from the Congo to talk about how they left perfectly good America to live in a hut in the rainforest.

Probably after the ceremony some kindly rich man would give me my new bike, because God doesn't have to do everything metaphysically. He can use rich people to create a win-win Christian situation. For example, if a rich man gave me my bike, I would win because my prayer would be answered and my faith would be better. And the rich man would win because he used up some of his gold. Rich people have to ride on the back of a camel through the eye of a needle to get into heaven. The more money you give away, the skinnier your camel gets. The principle is outlined in the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus also warns against swallowing a camel. (Which is really good advice. I couldn't even count how many gnats I'd choked on in my day.)

Halfway through the ride to camp—just when I'd decided the Sufferer Ribbon was probably better than the Endurance Plaque because it matched my field day awards—the older girls and Jennifer Jones called me to the back of the van, where they were poring over a contraband Seventeen Magazine. None of the girls liked me because I always had dirt under my fingernails and I wore shorts under my dress to church every Sunday. "How do you think Superman gets changed so fast?" I had asked one of the girls a few weeks earlier when she'd mocked me. "Clothes under clothes! All the heroes are doing it!"

I reluctantly peeled my legs off the seat and walked to the back of the van. I was trying to rearrange myself on my new seat, letting my leg skin touch as little vinyl as possible, when the preacher's daughter said, "So, Heather, what are you praying for in a husband?"

I laughed out loud because it was about the funniest joke I'd ever heard.

Only she wasn't joking. I could tell Jennifer Jones was blushing for me because I didn't have the good sense to do it myself. "You're serious?" I asked.

The girls exchanged a look. "Heather," the pastor's daughter explained, placing a hand on my forearm in a comforting gesture her dad used every Sunday on the repenters. "Sometimes it takes God up to ten years to answer prayers. My sister started praying for a husband six years before God sent him. You'd better start praying right away."

Ten years! I did some quick math in my head to calculate how tall I would be in ten years. Did I need to start praying for a bigger bike?

"I don't want a husband," I said.

Several of the girls gasped, and Jennifer Jones blushed again.

"Why not?" the preacher's daughter demanded.

"Because he would look silly wearing the streamers I'm praying for to go along with my new bicycle," I said.

All of the girls, including Jennifer Jones, who, up until that moment had been one of my best friends, collapsed in a collective fit of giggles.

"Don't you want to get married?" former friend Jennifer Jones asked.

I shrugged.

"Heather, of course you want to get married!" she said. "Everyone wants to get married. And you'll want to do it by the time you're 22 or there's no hope for you."

"That's ridiculous!" I said, rolling my eyes. "My great-aunt Opal didn't get married until she was older than that, and do you know what she did instead? She went to California! On vacation!"

They said nothing. I knew if those girls weren't in awe of a place as exotic as California, there was no hope for them. I unstuck my legs once more from the viscous blue seat. "I'll pray for you," I mumbled as I turned toward the front of the van, though we all knew I would do no such thing.

---

Jesus said, "Feed my lambs."
- John 21:15

My Great-Aunt Opal had a Yorkshire Terrier named Prissy, and his eyes couldn't make tears. It was the darndest thing. Every four hours—day and night, holidays or no—Aunt Opal had to squeeze artificial teardrops into Prissy's eyeballs so they didn't get crusty and fall out. I knew early on you could judge character by the way a person treated animals. If you'd pet the mangy cats over at the baseball field or let a dog lick you full on the face, we could be friends. If you'd wake up in the night to wet your dog's eyeballs, we could be friends forever.

After church camp, my dad set up a lunch date for my sister and me with Aunt Opal, which meant one of our all-time favorite things: Shoney's. In addition to being able to order from a menu while sitting down, Shoney's Restaurant afforded a person the opportunity to eat from the salad bar. If you ordered the salad bar, you didn't have to wait for your food to cook, and who was to stop you from eating one entire plate of pepperonis and one entire plate of pre-sliced watermelon? The answer was no one; no one was to stop you. Shoney's was like The White House, or God's own kitchen table.

Aunt Opal came to pick us up in her shiny, red Buick, and I let out a low whistle when that thing pulled into our driveway. You could tell just from looking that it had air-conditioning and automatic windows. Jenn and I piled into the backseat together, cleaner than we ever were for a trip in the stifling "Baptist" van. I knew I should keep my hands to myself; my dad was forever saying the back seat was not a playground. But the automatic window button was glowing angel bright and it was causing my fingers to prickle. I could tell even Jennifer—who was usually years beyond me in sophistication—was aching to touch it.

The radio was never on in Aunt Opal's car. When you talked she looked you in the eye and she said, "Uh huh, uh huh," and sometimes even repeated parts of your story back to you. She laughed in the right places and gasped in the right places. The woman was a hoot. My mom said Aunt Opal had a way about her, and I would have always headed that way if I could've figure out what direction it was in.

She was my Grandpa Tom's sister, and she'd taken a turn raising him after their mama died. Aunt Opal didn't have any kids of her own, but her dog couldn't cry. It's not like she didn't have her hands full.

At Shoney's I ordered both me and Jenn salad bars and Cokes, with two straws each, because even the disciples pushed for more miracles.

I told Aunt Opal what I learned at church camp, how King David had written nearly half the Psalms, and some of them were nothing but whining. "The man had everything," I told Aunt Opal. "But you should read the way he just goes on and on about his problems and how he's scared God's just going to put him down like a mad dog. He's a baby," I said. "No, worse than a baby. He's practically a girl."

"The Lord values honesty," Aunt Opal said. I stuffed a whole quartered watermelon into my mouth. (Another thing about the salad bar: you got a clean plate every time you went back, which was as many times as you wanted.)

When Jenn had had her fill of salad bar and my theological commentary, she asked Aunt Opal to tell us about her trip to California. It was our favorite part of every meal.

Aunt Opal wiped her mouth with her napkin and placed it gently in her lap. "My best friend Alma and I just packed up our bags one day," she said. "And we headed Out West."

I thought I might throw up. Life's second great delight (after homemade ice cream) was packing a bag. You put your favorite Fruit Loops t-shirt—the one you got for sending in 5 Proofs of Purchase plus Shipping and Handling—into your bag and zipped it up. Your shirt stays in your bag thinking it's just a regular old drawer or something, but the secret is you're not sitting still. Maybe hours or a whole day later you unzip your bag and surprise: your shirt is in the mountains or at the beach, and it will never be a regular old play shirt again. Clothes never recover from being packed.

"We saw the Pacific Ocean," Aunt Opal said. "We saw everything. We spent every dollar we had while we were out there and when we came home we were flat broke. And neither of us had a paycheck coming for two weeks."

"What'd you do?" I asked. I was overly-familiar with the concept of being flat broke.

"We ate cabbage for two solid weeks."

I gagged a little.

"We ate it boiled," she said. "We ate it stewed. We baked it, we fried it. We ate it every way you could imagine. I swore I'd never eat cabbage again after those two weeks."

"Did you?" my sister asked.

"It took me a while, but yes." Aunt Opal smiled up into her eyes. "Honey," she said, "It was worth it."

After lunch, in the backseat once more, Jenn motioned toward the windows. "Aunt Opal," she said. "Would you mind if we..."

"Oh, are you hot?" Aunt Opal asked.

"Lord, yes," I said just as Jenn said, "No, ma'am." Jenn shot me a look. "We just wanted to see how these windows worked."

I could see from her rearview mirror reflection she was pleased as punch to have us along for the ride. We lowered and raised the backseat windows all the way home.

*

The Youth Group was meant to stand up in church the Sunday after camp and talk about everything we'd learned. I didn't walk the aisle the do it. Just thinking about walking the aisle made my legs seize up with cramps. I stayed proper in my seat until the sermon was finished and the preacher said, "Let's all turn our hymnals to page 187, Just As I Am."

I bowed my head.

Dear God, I prayed.. I meant to thank him for lunch with my Aunt Opal and a safe ride home in that van, but all I could think of was King David's belly-aching ways, and how, even so, he was a man after God's own heart. I heaved a deep, steadying breath. God, I said, there seems to be some question as to whether or not you actually created the world in seven days. Up until now I've been defending you pretty good, but let me ask you something: if it's true, if you made a whole planet in less than a week, then how long does it take to manufacture a gol' darn bicycle! You said ask, I asked. You said seek, I seeked. You said find, and that's my problem, but it ain't for a lack of looking. And here's another thing, God: it looks like I've gotta start praying for a husband. I don't want one. I can't think of a time when I'm going to want one. But if it's absolutely necessary, go on ahead and get it in line. If you have to choose between the husband and the bike, I'd rather have the bike. If you have to choose between the husband and just the bike streamers, I'll take the streamers. I'm going to California soon, because Aunt Opal says it's worth it. Please try to make cabbage taste better while I'm gone. And God, if they're out of green, a blue bike will be just fine.

I said amen, opened my eyes, and added my voice to the choir of God's lambs.