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WE HAD A GROUP MEETING Saturday morning to go over all of the security protocols and to insert Zander and me into the work rotation—me in the command center until I healed all the way and Zander on guard duty.
By noon the next day, we’d started to settle into “compound” living with Mal’s crew. Unfortunately, the next day was Sunday.
“We’ll miss church this morning,” Zander sighed, “not that we dare paint a target on our friends at Grace Chapel by showing up there. I hope someday we can convince Pastor Lucklow that we’re not the losers he probably thinks we are.”
“We’ve missed our Bible time with the Lord for an entire week, too,” I reminded him. “I feel . . . stale and dry. I need a big drink of living water!”
“Hard to have regular devotions when we’re running and gunning for our lives.”
“Running and gunning? We’re picking up Malware lingo now? Listen, we need some Bible time. Since we missed church this morning, we should have church here. You and me.”
He glanced at me. I could see the wheels turning behind his eyes. “Actually . . . that’s a great idea, Jay.”
“What did you have in mind?”
Now a devious light sparked in his eyes. “You and me and all of Malware, Inc.”
“Ooooh! Spill it, mister.”
***
WE INVITED EVERYONE (Mal and his five-man crew plus Gamble and Trujillo) to dinner and “chapel” that evening in the workout room. To a person, our invitations were met with skepticism and narrow-eyed resistance. To a person, Zander shrugged and said, “What we’re facing is bigger than all of us. We need God’s help. I’m not afraid to ask him for it—are you?”
Our macho friends professed to be afraid of nothing, so the challenge had an effect—of sorts.
“I’ll come to dinner, but I probably won’t stay for the other,” was Mal’s even reply.
“Yeah. What he said,” McFly added.
“Sure. You decide,” Zander said. “I’m making my mom’s enchiladas.”
Deckard smacked his lips. “Oh, I’m not gonna pass on that. Just, you know, I’m not a religious person.”
“Good. I’m not either.”
Mal loaned us a car to go get groceries and sent Baltar with us to ride shotgun. From there on, Zander was in charge. He ordered Baltar and me up and down the supermarket aisles getting this and that—including spices I’d never heard of. Back at the apartments, he commandeered pots, pans, and dishes from other apartments and ran our little kitchen like a battlefield.
Baltar fled as soon as he could. I would have, too, but, being married to the guy, I was more or less stuck. By the time we finished at six that evening, we had three ginormous pans of red chile enchiladas (two chicken and one pork), a huge tossed salad, two pans of a cheesy/spicy rice dish, and a couple of gallons of sweet iced tea.
Logan and McFly set up two tables and a dozen folding chairs in the weight room for us and laid the tables with plates, forks, glasses, and paper napkins scavenged from their apartments. Then they helped us haul the food downstairs.
Everyone came. We chowed down, complimented Zander on his enchiladas, told jokes, laughed at each other, and generally had a wonderful time. I think it was the most fun any of us had enjoyed in a while. I know it was for Zander and me.
I was particularly glad to see Trujillo. Her face was a ridiculous mess of bruises and stitches, but she seemed . . . content. Might have been the way Gamble waited on her hand and foot, seeing that she had what she wanted to eat or drink, fetching a pillow for her back. Behaving like a total dork.
I loved it.
“What?” he demanded. “You’re grinning like the village idiot.”
“I’m happy for you, Gamble.”
He blushed. “Oh. Yeah. That.”
“Yeah,” I said dryly. “That.”
Dinner wound down, but before anyone could run from the promised “chapel” time, Zander pushed back his chair and stood.
“Look, I’ll keep this short. Deckard told me he’s not religious, and I don’t want to mess with his bad-boy status.”
We hooted and pointed at Deckard. He bowed in mock acknowledgment.
“The only thing I wanted to share with you is this, from the Gospel of John, Chapter 3. Now, in this passage, Jesus is talking to a religious person, but the guy didn’t get what Jesus was telling him. See, religion makes us deaf and blind to the good news. Religion is like an inoculation, a vaccine: It prevents you from catching the real deal.
“Jesus put it this way—and I’m going to paraphrase it here, so please don’t fact check me—you in particular, Gamble. I see you reaching for your phone!”
Zander’s self-deprecation and light humor elicited more good-natured laughter, but I blinked back tears. He was so kind when he shared the Gospel! He had an amazing gift, a calling from God, a powerful anointing to do just this: to speak the truth in love—and it completely blew me away, every time.
The first time I’d heard him—as he preached to the homeless in Albuquerque—I had been both awed and convicted. The Lord had used Zander’s words to jumpstart my journey back to him. I would forever be grateful.
“Anyway, what Jesus said was, ‘Look. I didn’t come into the world to condemn it; I came into the world to save it—the world is already going to hell in a handbasket, so I came to save it.’
“Think about that for a sec. Isn’t that the opposite of what you’ve heard? Haven’t you been told that God can’t wait to judge you, that he’s sitting up there right now with a big stick, just salivating over the beatdown he’s planning for you?”
A few heads nodded.
“Yes, we will all answer for the lives we have lived and, considering some of the things we’ve done, that is a scary proposition.”
Zander looked around. “You-all know me as John-Boy. John-Boy. Yeah, kind of a geeky guy. Squeaky-clean.” He grinned. “Hard to figure why a hot babe like Ellen Ripley would choose me, right?”
Snorts and snickers. Baltar raised his hand, “Don’t you fret; I’m here when you get tired of him, Rip.”
More laughs, and McFly jumped in, “Don’t settle for that old man, Ripley!”
Baltar roared, “Who you calling old?”
Zander grinned, too. Then, when the laughter started to subside, he dropped the bomb.
“Yeah, nerdy me. What you don’t know about me . . . are the years I spent in an American-Mexican gang, about the drugs I peddled, the innocent girls I pimped, the drinking, the sex, the violence. I have a lot to answer for.”
No one was laughing anymore.
“I thank God that someone had the guts to tell me the truth about my need for God. See, one day, out of the blue, this old dude walked up to me on the street and said that God made me in his image, that he loved me the way a father loves his child. He asked me, ‘Do you like this life? Or do you want a new one?’ Well, I wanted to pull a blade on that old guy. I’m telling you, I wanted to stick him in the worst way.
“But he just kept on talking. He told me that God never wanted distance between me and him. That it was not God’s idea or desire for me to wander away, to be separated from him.
“Then he told me about the fix—God’s Plan B. What’s Plan B? I want you to think about the attack on the clubhouse last Tuesday morning, just five days ago. We were hit with superior numbers and overwhelming firepower. That Black Hawk hovered in the street and strafed the clubhouse with .50cal BMG rounds. Nothing—nothing—survived that barrage.
“With the outer walls breached, you were forced to retreat into the training center. You had reinforced that room, too, but the opposition planted charges that blew right through your thick walls. If they hadn’t knocked themselves out with their own gas, we might have lost that battle.
“Well, what if we had lost? I want you to remember the panic room in the training room. With the clubhouse breached and burning around us, you still had an ace in the hole. You had built, inside the panic room, a bug-out hatch and a tunnel that led to safety—a way out. A way to escape certain death. And I want to remind you that the bug-out tunnel was the only way out of the clubhouse once it was overrun.
“God made a way out, too. A way to escape the coming reckoning. For all the sinful, wicked, unconscionable things I had done in my past, for every appalling act I had committed, God made a way of escape.
“His name is Jesus.”
~~**~~
