Working On It, Part II
Alright, it must be the full moon tonight. Because, once again, I’m compelled to let loose with the unthinkable and post another installment of Endure The Night. This is the beginning, just the beginning of chapter one, and it introduces what will be a continuing fixture starting each one. Namely, a conversation between God and someone else (whose identity will only be revealed at the very last chapter) (which is as much a teaser as it is critical to the actual events which took place).
A note on the conversations: It was years of struggle (and I don’t exaggerate on that one) figuring out how to write this story. There were parts and elements that simply did not, and do not, fit well within conventional confines. Not to me anyway. Perhaps I recruit that simply to forestall, again, writing it down at all. I’m not sure.
In any case, it was about four years ago one evening that the solution dawned over me and lent me the final, missing piece: a certain artistic license, if you will, affording me a platform to broaden the story surrounding the events in a way which satisfied me. The following synopsis (perhaps for the back cover) expounds a bit on what I mean:
The Conversations between God and one other open, overarch, and close the whole story with an Otherworld perspective on what I experienced. Setting in motion a journey toward reconciliation and redemption, a reunion I never expected and for fifteen years didn’t know I didn’t fully understand until a secret was revealed to me that brought into focus the whole story of my life.
I certainly fled Him down the days and down the nights, and suffered His edict that there would be no thing sheltering me ‘who would not shelter Thee.’
And though this is just a story, my story, it is also a sort of Midrash…that ancient Jewish milieu making ample space for story-telling, teaching and exegesis. So I’ll say it here: if you mean to force what I’m telling through the lens of rigorously executed theology, I can promise you’re going to be sorely disappointed. Or violently offended.
Or both.
So don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Alright. That’s that. The book’s Introduction is succinct, to say the very least, and immediately ushers in the first conversation setting the stage for the following chapter.
I include here the beginning of the book with an invitation to sample what I’m working on…and a request that the reader lend no small measure of grace: I really don’t like doing this.
But, again…compelled.
* * *
I was born an artist. The manner by which the creativity in my family’s genetic code elected to present itself in me, at least most noticeably, was in illustration. Cartooning to be exact, if you can believe that. I mention it only to somehow explain, albeit anemically, the constant availability with which the senses convey to my heart and mind the experiences and sensations of the world around me. Which is a mouthful, but only offered here to establish what for me is a natural disposition. That is, that I am no stranger to emotion and not at all uncomfortable in it.
But then that was before God decided it was time to ruin my life.
* * *
“Come with Me to where I ever Am, a place you once were but are no more. I would have you present at a birth. Are you willing?”
“I am willing.”
“Then come. Your brother’s heart is soon to begin beating again.”
* * *
The story of my life—the real story—began when I was twenty-four years old. At a Christmas party serving as ground zero for the start of an adventure I never would have signed up for had I known what was coming.
I realize now it started earlier than this particular night, which I learned was the birthday of the girl who would one day be my wife. It would be a full year before I met her. I know, too, that the composure and decorum I possessed was coming to a pale end as God, with the infinite precision I would grow to recognize more and more, counted down, ‘…three…two…one…Now.’ And, right on schedule, and in the space of one heartbeat, the story He had set in motion eastered its way into my life with no more fanfare than a couple entering a room to greet their friends at a Christmas party.
I watched them come in entirely unaware of the interior events about to unfold. Meaning little since I was no more aware than anyone else. Their arrival, benign as could be, was a trojan horse conceiling a lethal agent, somehow giving me pause to consider what it would have been like to see my own parents walk into the same room on the same night greeting the same people and knowing the same warmth and comfort of the relationships now filling the whole of the great room at Downing House. And though the consideration felt harmless just moments before, it flared now into a devastating onslaught as the hypothesis of my parents entering my world brought with it the necessary, and until now entirely unconsidered significance: that their being there in the physical would have meant also that their hearts were there as well.
Which would have been no small thing seeing as how seven years before, I left the home of my youth knowing I would never return.
hmmm.
Okay, I’m in. Where do I place my book order?
As soon as I finish it, unless there’s some way to order a clone for me and a book for you.