“Not too much, I hope.”
“Why would you hope that?” I said slowly, my eyes once again darting from a paralyzed Anna to her dad’s unchanged stare.
“The word of the Lord is serious business,” he said. “At least in our house.”
“Um,” I said, blinking, “of course. Yeah. My house too.”
“Which verses did y’all study last night?” Lorraine said.
“I’m sorry?” I asked, confused. Anna seemed to shrink, and her dad’s eyes narrowed. Then it hit me—Anna had told them we were at Bible study. “Sorry, I haven’t had my coffee yet. We mostly focused on the Gospel of John.”
“Ah,” her dad said, nodding. “‘For the wages of sin is death.’”
I couldn’t help smiling; I might not have been to church in years, but I’d paid attention when I was there. “It’s definitely powerful, but that’s from Romans,” I said. “My favorite passage from John is, ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him may not perish.’ It’s so life-focused, you know? So hopeful.”
“Can’t disagree,” her dad said, a note of grudging respect in his voice.
“Anna, dear, you did it!” Lorraine said, clapping happily.
Anna looked up, confused. “Did what?”
“You made friends with a good influence for once.”
I cleared my throat and looked out at the trees.
*
“Thanks,” Anna whispered twenty minutes later as we sidled into a red-upholstered pew near the front. The inside of the church was small and painted stark-white, but the red carpeting and upholstery and the light pouring in through the abstract stained-glass windows made it much more beautiful than it seemed from outside. “Sorry I didn’t warn you,” she continued as we sat. “They were listening when I called.”
“Of course,” I whispered in reply, touching her wrist and smiling. “Don’t worry about it.”
The adults milled about in the pews, smiling and slapping each other on the back while Anna and I sat quietly with our hands in our laps. After a few minutes, an ancient man with skin like wrinkled marble and owl eyes strode up to the pulpit, an old leather Bible tucked under his arm, and everyone grew quiet. Despite his age he moved with military grace as he silently dropped the Good Book on the lectern and flipped to the appropriate page.
“Therefore, seeing we have this ministry,” the pastor said, in a huge, youthful voice that filled the church without the aid of speakers, “as we have received mercy, we faint not; But have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.” He removed his reading glasses and looked up to survey the congregation.
“That’s 2 Corinthians 4:1 and 4:2, if y’all’s interested.” He cleared his throat and closed his Bible, the thump resounding in the silence of the sanctuary. “Lotta good lines in Corinthians, I’ve always found. ‘Through a glass darkly’ and ‘childish things’ and so on, but that line I just read’s got as much meat as any of the others.”
My eyes drifted up to the window behind him, and the rippling grass on the hillside. Lots of the girls in the support group back home had called transitioning “living our truth,” and maybe that was true. My eyes turned up just a little more and there, hanging above the window and the green grass, was a small wooden cross.
“’Fore I go any further, though, I’d like to tell a joke. Stop me if y’all’ve heard this’n: What’s the difference ’tween a Southern Baptist and a Methodist?” A smile twitched onto his lips and he looked around expectantly, but nobody made a sound. “The Methodist says ‘Hello’ in a liquor store!” A few people chuckled awkwardly, but most just shifted in their seats.
“You see, we got a bit of a image problem in our church,” the pastor said, growing suddenly serious. “Not that we got a bad image, mind; no, in fact it’s the opposite: we’re too concerned with image. We’re too concerned with the external, with our appearances, with what others think of us, when we should be concerned with the internal, with our hearts, and with what God thinks of us. Radical honesty and radical faith are the heart of Christianity, ladies and gentlemen.