Fields of Grace Page 4

  Some days went better than others, and every night, when our work was done, we returned to camp and tallied up how many people each of the groups had saved that day. It was a pretty competitive process, and I loved winning. Papa always said that if I wasn’t looking hard enough, someone wouldn’t get saved, and God would hold me responsible. I knew what that meant, so I’d trained my eye really well. But, one day, toward the end of our stay, I did almost miss someone.

  My team and I walked into a dusty little courtyard, toward a cluster of tiny houses. A man was sitting on a rock outside one of the houses, and he was bathing himself from a pail with about two inches of muddy water in the bottom and a bar of pink soap. The man didn’t look up, and we nearly passed by him. He seemed indifferent, and it looked as if he was alone at the house. We were about to move on when I told the group to stop—we needed to get our numbers up. After praying so hard every day I felt like I was in tune with what God wanted for our team, and He wanted us to talk to that man.

  The man was a little bit stout, with a potbelly, probably sixty or seventy, though he looked much older. He had sharp facial features and a long hooked nose. He was hunched over, washing himself. His cane was propped up against the rock. I was pretty sensitive about being intrusive, but I knew it was my duty, my obligation, to get his attention.

  I was thirteen, and everyone in my group was older than me, all of them fourteen or fifteen or sixteen years old, and our team leader was eighteen, but I took the lead. I walked up to the man, and he still didn’t look up.

  “My name is Hannah,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  The man didn’t answer, so I had all of the others on our team introduce themselves as well.

  He still didn’t speak.

  “Can we pray for you for anything?” I asked.

  The man shook his head. No.

  “Please,” I said. “There must be something we can pray over you for.”

  The man started shouting in Zulu. “Ndiyekele! Ndiyekele!” What is he saying? I asked the translator. She told us the man was blind and hard of hearing. He wanted us to leave him alone. I wanted to leave. I wanted to move on to the next house, where there were more people to save. People who were bound to be more open than the man washing himself on the rock. But then I remembered Papa’s words. “If you see an opportunity to pray over someone and you don’t, you miss what God is saying to you.” I felt compelled to pray for the man’s eyes. In my mind, I was thinking about the story in the Book of John in the Bible when Jesus made the blind man see.

  As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man who had been blind from birth. “Rabbi,” his disciples asked him, “why was this man born blind? Was it because of his own sins or his parents’ sins?”

  “It was not because of his sins or his parents’ sins,” Jesus answered. “This happened so the power of God could be seen in him. We must quickly carry out the tasks assigned us by the one who sent us. The night is coming, and then no one can work. But while I am here in the world, I am the light of the world.”

  Then he spat on the ground, made mud with the saliva, and spread the mud over the blind man’s eyes. He told him, “Go wash yourself in the pool of Siloam.” So the man went and washed and came back seeing!

  His neighbors and others who knew him as a blind beggar asked each other, “Isn’t this the man who used to sit and beg?” Some said he was, and others said, “No, he just looks like him!”

  But the beggar kept saying, “Yes, I am the same one!”

  They asked, “Who healed you? What happened?”

  He told them, “The man they call Jesus made mud and spread it over my eyes and told me, ‘Go to the pool of Siloam and wash yourself.’ So I went and washed, and now I can see!”

  I knew what I had to do. I didn’t have dirt to make mud, but I knew God allowed us to ad lib in situations like this, so I decided to use the soap instead. “I think God wants us to do this,” I said. The man didn’t understand, but he nodded his head in agreement. I removed his thick glasses. Everyone began praying, and I took the soap and began washing the man’s eyes. I kept telling myself to believe. The Bible told me if I believed hard enough—if I believed that the man would see—then God would make it so.

  We continued praying for the man and, after a few minutes, he looked straight into my eyes. His eyes got really big, and he began mumbling in his native tongue. “What is he saying?” I asked the interpreter. “He’s saying ‘I can see! I can see!’ ” she said. I turned back to the man and saw a sense of awe in his expression as he studied me. I felt as if he were studying every angle and crevice of my face. I looked into his eyes. They were black and empty. I felt like I was looking into a dark, bottomless well. Could he really see? Why would he pretend?

  I decided to push God a little harder. “May we pray over your ears?” I asked. The man eagerly agreed. After we’d been praying awhile, the translator leaned over and whispered something in the man’s ear. The man whispered back. “He can hear!” the translator shouted. “He can hear!” Before that, when the man said he was hard of hearing, the translator had been shouting in his ear, but he could barely hear her. Now he heard her speaking in a faint whisper. We all cried “Hallelujah!”

  We weren’t finished yet. We asked the man to join us for services at the local church on Sunday. He said he would, except that he had hurt his leg and had trouble walking because he was in so much pain. I began to pray over his leg. I was praying and praying, yet nothing was happening. How can this be? I wondered. Why would God stop responding to our prayers now? The translator began speaking to the man with a sharp tongue. It was clear that they were arguing. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

  The translator pointed to the man’s wrist. “The bracelet!” she said. “He told me it’s from a witch doctor, and I’m trying to get him to take it off.” The witch doctor had told the man the bracelet would help to ease his leg pain, and he refused to take it off.

  My team members and I had been taught that certain symbols meant evil spirits were present and that the spirits could control anything. For instance, a voodoo doll has an evil spirit living inside that can come upon you, but if you get rid of the doll, you’re released from the grasp of the bad spirit. Was the bracelet the reason God wasn’t answering our prayers over the man’s leg? My team members and I agreed that it could be the problem.

  Buoyed by my previous success, I waved away the translator and put my hands over the man’s hands. “Please,” I said, gently. “Please allow me to remove your bracelet.” The man hesitated. “Please,” I said. “Please just take it off. Take it off and believe in our God. Believe that our God will take away your pain.” Slowly, with shaking hands, the man removed the bracelet. We all prayed over him for relief of the pain in his leg, even harder than we’d prayed about his eyes and his ears.

  Soon the man said his leg didn’t hurt anymore. I could hardly believe it myself. First his eyes, then his ears, and now his leg. By then, it was getting dark, and we had to head back to camp. There hadn’t been time to take out our cards and try to get him to recite the Salvation Prayer. I promised the man we would return in the morning to see how he was feeling. “Please,” I said. “Please don’t put that bracelet back on.”

  My team and I were giddy on the way back to camp. We certainly weren’t going to win that night’s contest for saves since we had spent the whole day with that one man and had run out of time to witness to him. But there was always tomorrow.

  After dinner, we told the other teams about what had happened with the old man. “Praise God!” everyone said.

  I tossed and turned all that night, worrying that if the man put that bracelet on again and died before we got back to try to save him in the morning, he would go to Hell.

  When we returned the next day, on a Sunday, the man wasn’t there. I was both disappointed and scared. Disappointed because I wanted to see if the miracle had stuck. Scared, thinking about the power of God. I couldn’t get the man out of
my mind after that. I couldn’t help but wonder what had become of him. Could he still see? Hear? Had he put the bracelet back on?

  We were working in different neighborhoods, but I finally made it back to his house a day or two later. Once again, he wasn’t there. We asked around about the man with the hunched back, and people told us that he could still see and hear.

  And the reason he wasn’t home was that he had gone to the Christian church nearby. And he had walked there.

  Wow, I thought. We had assisted God with a miracle. It was the first time in my life that I really felt worthy of being the kid of Ron Luce. Maybe I did have the Luce juice.

  5

  Bad Books

  I have no Faith—I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart—& make me suffer untold agony.

  —MOTHER TERESA, IN AN UNDATED LETTER, IN COME BE MY LIGHT: THE PRIVATE WRITINGS OF THE “SAINT OF CALCUTTA”

  It wasn’t long after my big debut at “Acquire the Fire,” Papa’s big event in Denver, that I began to really question the beliefs I was raised with. As little as I knew about life, having been so sheltered in the cloistered evangelical world I lived in, I had been taught that contentment was mine as long as I continued to follow God’s commands. The only problem was, I was having trouble hearing Him, and that caused me to feel cut off and isolated from everything and everyone I knew.

  I didn’t dare tell my parents that I feared God had abandoned me. Papa said that God had expectations of us and if we paid attention we’d just know what those expectations were. I kept praying for hints about what He wanted of me, but I wasn’t getting any feedback. I’d begun feeling anxious, wondering if I’d done or said something to incur His wrath. I tried to hide my anxiety from my parents. At first I figured, why worry them? God was bound to get back to me at some point. But as hard as I prayed to get His attention, it just wasn’t happening. I was doing plenty of talking, but He wasn’t talking back, and I started worrying about Papa and Mom finding out. They wouldn’t understand if they knew my dilemma and, even worse, they would fear for me, fear that by having lost that relationship I was condemned to spend eternity with the damned, wailing and gnashing my teeth in a fiery Hell. I knew too much of what the Bible said for my own good. I’d studied it since the time I could read. The Book of John says, “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish.” Papa always said the way to know we belong to God is to hear His voice, to know when He is speaking to us. But I couldn’t and I didn’t.

  I prayed for guidance. For hours on end, I sat on the floor in my bedroom, with my door locked, praying for Him to help me understand what was happening to me. Praying for Him to explain why I felt so abandoned and alone because I couldn’t hear Him. “O Lord God,” I prayed. “I know you’ve got a plan for me, or at least that’s what everybody says. I just need to figure out what it is. I’m doing everything I know to do to figure it out, but it seems as though the more I try to understand, the less You speak to me. Lord God, are You testing me? Yes, that’s it. It must be a test.”

  When I still didn’t hear back, I began looking for answers to my questions in books that I secretly collected from the kids I called silent rebels in Papa’s ministry. The silent rebels were a small, anonymous group within the Teen Mania family who were creative and artsy, as well as better-read and better-dressed than the rest of us. The names and faces changed, but there were always a handful of them among the hundreds of teenagers who were on campus at any given time, either interning or attending Christian boot camp, although Papa never knew who they were. Like everyone else who came to Teen Mania, they were there as a show of their devotion to God, but they were different in that they didn’t have blind faith in the word of the Gospel. I thought they were really cool, and I secretly related more to them than I did to the others. So I started seeking the truth, as they did, in places other than the Bible and the books sanctioned by Teen Mania as appropriate reading for us.

  I’d collected dozens of books and hidden them in my room. I could hardly wait for nighttime and the lights to go out in the house so I could lock my door and begin sifting through them.

  One night, long after my parents had gone to bed, I was in my room, at the other end of our rambling house, listening to a book on tape that I had gotten from one of my silent rebel friends and started the day before. The Great Divorce is a theological fantasy written by C. S. Lewis, a sort of Kafkaesque portrayal of the afterlife. Intellectually, it was way over my head, but that didn’t stop me from trying to understand it.

  The gist of the story is this: The narrator finds himself stuck in a gray, joyless city. He and a group of others eventually board a bus that travels to the foothills of an idyllic paradise where shining men and women meet them, people they once knew from earth. It turns out the bus passengers are “ghosts” from Hell, and the shiny men and women are “spirits” from Heaven who offer to show them the way in. But, rather than accepting the spirits’ offer of a chance at repentance and, ultimately, the great rewards of Heaven, almost all of the passengers choose to return to their grim, gloomy city, or Hell. The message of the book is that we decide to live in Hell by making choices that exclude us from finding in life the infinite happiness, or Heaven, that God wants for us. I couldn’t get enough of it.

  That night, though, as I listened for any sounds of my parents with one ear, and the narrator on the tape with the other, I heard the part of the story where a ghost tells a spirit, “I wish I had never been born. What are we born for?” she asks. “For infinite happiness,” the spirit replies. “You can step out into it at any moment.” When I heard that, something stirred in me, and I suddenly felt terrified. I felt like that doomed ghost on the tape. Had I ever felt infinite happiness? I asked myself. No, I admitted. I hadn’t. I had felt merry, and silly, and cheerful, but never completely joyful or content. I had always been taught that God was infinite and that, if only I accepted Him, eternal happiness was mine. But if Lewis was right, I had to make my own happiness, to choose it, and I had no idea how to do that. Did what he wrote in The Great Divorce mean my parents’ definition of God—what I had been taught since I was able to comprehend words and thoughts—was wrong?

  Suddenly I was overcome with feelings of panic. My skin prickled, as though my nerve endings were on fire, and my perspiration-soaked hair stuck to the nape of my neck. My heart was banging in my chest. Trying to calm myself, I recited aloud a Bible verse I had learned as a very young child: “God works all things for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purposes.” I loved God. At least I was trying to love Him, this mysterious entity that left so many people, including my parents, with lingering feelings of joy and fullness that I knew nothing about.

  I began crying and shaking. “God!” I prayed, curling up in a ball in the corner of my room. “Where are you? Why have you abandoned me? I’m just a kid. Why do I feel so alone in all of this? Why do I feel trapped in the gray city? Why can’t I hear you? I’m so confused!”

  My body trembled, and I couldn’t breathe. I looked at the clock on my nightstand. It was three-thirty in the morning. My parents always taught us that unless blood, smoke, or fire were involved, we were not to wake them after bedtime, and I knew that if I did awaken them I’d be punished for staying up so late on a school night. I was too panicked, too distraught to care. As far as I was concerned, this was as much of an emergency as a fire.

  “I need Papa!” I cried. “Papa! Papa?”

  I left my bedroom and slowly made my way through the dark corridor to the other end of the house where my parents’ room was. I cracked open the door and quietly slipped inside, hoping not to wake my mother. I tiptoed to Papa’s side of the bed and nudged him. At first he didn’t stir. “Papa!” I cried, shaking him. “Papa! Please, Papa! Help me! I’m afraid! I don’t know what to believe anymore!” Tears streamed down my cheeks, and I was panting and sobbing.

  Papa shot up in bed. “What
is it, Hannah?” he asked. “What is it, sweetheart?” I began to wail. “Shhhhhhhhh!” Papa whispered, climbing out of bed and ushering me out of the room.

  “Princess! Princess, tell me what happened!” he said when we were outside in the hallway. Papa had called me princess for as long as I could remember.

  “I don’t know what to do anymore!” I said, weeping uncontrollably. “I was . . . reading . . . books . . . I can’t . . . God . . . how can I?” I was barely able to choke my words out. “The ghost . . . the ghhhooosssstttt!”

  “What are you talking about?” Papa asked. All I could do was point toward my room and blather incoherently.

  “Show me,” Papa said.

  I led him to my room where my boom box was still playing the book on tape. “Friend, I am not suggesting at all. You see, I know now. Let us be frank. Our opinions were not honestly come by. We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful. At college, you know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause. When, in our whole lives, did we honestly face, in solitude, the one question on which all turned: whether after all the Supernatural might not in fact occur? When did we put up one moment’s real resistance to the loss of our faith?”

  Papa turned off the boom box. My other secret books were spread out on the floor next to my bed, all of them with the same theme—re-examining evangelical Christian dogma, defining a different kind of God than my father’s God. All of the books were open to different pages. The little princess had obviously been reading for quite some time. Among the book were Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality and Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance, both by Donald Miller, and Lifelines: Holding On (And Letting Go), by Forrest Church.