This year I’m not only ready for Christmas Eve, I’m ambushing it like a Nativity Ninja,” I told Trent on the way to his parents’ house for the holidays. “Your family’s Christmas Eve curse isn’t getting me this year, no sir. If I’m spending my entire twenty-ninth year experiencing various religions, I will be in attendance on the most-churched day of the year.”
In the previous four holiday seasons, our clan had made it to a Christmas Eve service only once—not that I’d been disappointed about this fact. Our absence was not for my mother-in-law’s lack of trying. Circumstances like lack of available seats or bad timing had always conspired against Becky. We’d spent several Christmas Eves driving around looking for a church that would have us, but alas, there was no room in the pew.
“Even my contingencies have contingencies this year!” I proudly showed my husband the arrows I’d drawn from secondary options to tertiary plans. “Just promise me we’ll make it to church tonight.”
“Why do I need to promise? It looks like you’re ready for everything.”
Everything except what happened.
“BECKY?” I CALLED NERVOUSLY to my mother-in-law from the bathroom. She entered wearing a jingle bells apron. If she was surprised that I was not wearing any pants, she didn’t show it. Even though I dearly love my mother-in-law, showing her my naked backside is not high on my list of holiday bonding activities. Still, in need of a second opinion, I bent over and pulled down my underwear to show her my rear.
“Is it just me, or do these hives look a little dangerous?”
She examined the lower half of my body, which looked like I’d been attacked by killer red slime in a 1980s horror film, except the slime was still growing: Even as we watched, conjoined, welted bumps crept slowly up my body.
“It certainly looks painful.” I could hear concern in her voice. “Does your throat feel tight?”
I swallowed. “A little.”
“Let’s take you next door. Our neighbor’s son is a doctor.”
Five minutes later I was half-naked in the back hall of the neighbor’s Christmas celebration, showing my nether regions to a stranger while the sounds of Christmas played merrily in the next room. Children were laughing. Chestnuts were roasting. My throat was closing. Or, at least that’s what the visiting doctor thought might be happening.
“Can’t really tell without my tools,” he announced, peering down my throat with a flashlight and a Popsicle stick. “But I advise you to get to the nearest doctor.”
Doctor? Wasn’t he a doctor? I do not expose myself to neighbors’ visiting sons just for fun! (It turned out he wasn’t licensed for Ohio practice.) The doctor went back to his kids and their presents; Becky and I went home in a panic.
“I need you to drive me to the ER,” I told Trent in Becky’s kitchen. He groaned and put the Yuletide Ale he was about to open back in the fridge.
“You’re both overreacting,” he said. “It’s just some red spots. You’ve had hives every day for months.” Trent is so calm that I’m not even sure he considers death an emergency. Becky handed him the keys, leaving no room for discussion.
“I have huge hives,” I explained at the Urgent Care check-in. “My breath feels squished, like I’m trying to breathe through a straw.” Rarely have I seen a nurse move so quickly. Urgent Care is usually like Wait-Five-Hours-Care, but this lady had me in a room, naked but for a paper gown, and two other nurses examining me faster than you can hum “Away in a Manger.”
One nurse fetched a doctor, who examined me with lightning speed. He pointed accusingly at Trent. “Driving is faster than the ambulance. Take your wife to the emergency room. Now! ” Trent’s eyes widened and the color drained from his face. The staff bundled us out the door without even asking my name. They must have wanted to avoid a scandal. Holiday deaths are notoriously bad for business.
Five minutes into the drive I began choke-breathing in the passenger seat and Trent’s version of panic hit—which is to say, he broke the speed limit.
“I love you,” I squeaked.
“I love you, too,” he said, accelerating.
“Focus on your breathing. In and out,” the Urban Monk had instructed in meditation training when I became frustrated that I couldn’t concentrate my attention. Well. My breath certainly had my full attention in the car on Christmas Eve. (Perhaps Throat Closing Meditation could become a new craze. 100% Guaranteed to wipe your mind of every extraneous worry!)
I wondered how many more people find God on the way to the emergency room than in church. If I could have spoken, I might have told Trent that churches angling for converts should set up a little Salvation Stand on the way into the hospital, where you could be splashed with holy water on demand. When we arrived at the hospital, for example, I would have accepted a splashing of Holy Boiling Oil if it meant I could breathe.
The ER staff pumped me full of adrenaline and Benadryl and steroids, but it could have been liquefied Twinkies for all I cared. Suddenly I breathed pounds upon pounds of delicious air:
“In and out. In and out. In and out,” soothed the nurse.
My mind went completely blank but for the beautiful, beautiful air. My own powerful, healing breath filled me so completely there was no room for thought, and it was just as peaceful as the Urban Monk had always said it would be.
DOCTORS COULDN’T TELL ME what I’d reacted to on Christmas Eve, or why the reaction had been so severe. But I was so accustomed to not having medical answers that I simply shrugged my shoulders, stashed an Epi-Pen in my purse for emergency use, and didn’t worry about it. A one-time ER experience was much easier to dismiss than the perpetual Sickness, and besides, I had more important things on my mind: I needed to get back to my project, my meditation training, and boot camp. For a Thirty by Thirty jump-start, I clicked the “Request a Free Bible Study” link on the Jehovah’s Witness website.
When my doorbell rang in the early evening the very next night, I was surprised to find a beaming young couple on my doorstep.
“Hello! We’re Mary and John Prince, with the Jehovah’s Witnesses!” said the couple in unison.
“Hello,” I replied, wishing I had on real clothes instead of fuzzy purple slippers and frog pajamas, since they were dressed in their Sunday best. “I submitted my request less than twenty-four hours ago. You work fast!”
I felt obligated to ask them inside since I had invited them (sort of). I offered beverages, which they declined. Maybe this was rule #1 at the School of Door-Knockers Missionary Training Academy: Do not accept beverages of unknown origins.
Mary and John sat together, on the opposite couch, and it felt like that moment on a date when you know you’re going to get naked, but you’re not sure who is going to make the first move. They smiled, and I considered that I couldn’t have chosen a more gorgeous couple for my first spiritual threesome; from their ebony skin to glowing smiles, the couple was a study in beauty and they seemed eager to make lots of little Jehovah’s Witness converts together.
Mr. Prince plunged right in: “Tell us about your spiritual background!”
Explaining my project should have made it clear I wasn’t a candidate for conversion, but they looked at each other knowingly, seeming to telegraph with their eyes—You’ve got this one, babe!—before Mrs. Prince asked me an opening question.
“If you did believe we had the truth, then would you be willing to convert?”
Tsk-tsk, trying to sell a saleswoman, I thought.
Unfortunately for the Princes, I was not a yes-woman. I evaded her question with a statement. “Your question makes the assumption that I believe there is only one truth.”
This stopped them, but only briefly; Mr. Prince made a fast recovery. (Perhaps a battery of difficult statements was included in Missionary Sales 201?)
“I’m not trying to be difficult,” I apologized. “I’ve just been through a lot, religion-wise. I do believe in truth, but I don’t believe one religion has it.”
Both Mr. and Mrs. Prince nodded sympathetically, as if they had arrived to comfort me. Pity hid behind their smiles.
Poor, confused girl, I imagined Mr. Prince telling Mrs. Prince at the dinner table later that evening.
I know, Mrs. Prince would sigh, passing the mashed potatoes. Thirty religions? Imagine the confusion!
I did not take kindly to being pitied for seeking, but I recognized I was likely projecting my insecurities. Affording them the benefit of the doubt, I asked about their position on hell. Mr. Prince explained that what Jesus actually taught about hell was that it didn’t exist. I enjoyed this reasoning until he casually dropped the fact that God destroys wicked souls.
He filled the next half-hour with so much memorized scripture and conviction that I cheered him on internally—You go, Mr. Prince! Rah-rah-sis-boom-bah!—in spite of some of his odder statements such as, “Satan was evicted from heaven in 1914,” said so matter-of-factly that it seemed a historical fact, like the Revolutionary War or the invention of pantyhose.
Mr. Prince didn’t need me as his cheerleader, though, because Mrs. Prince looked as though she might joyfully jump his bones right after he finished discussing the Bible’s original Greek text for this-and-that verse.
They tackled my questions in tandem, scatting through the Scriptures like a dynamic jazz duo. I began to feel a bit dizzy.
“Do you realize you’re looking at the whole world through the lens of your religion?” I asked.
Mr. Prince cleared his throat. “I don’t see it that way.”
“What if you’re wrong about your beliefs?”
“Then I’m wrong,” he said in the manner of a martyr telling the Inquisitor to light the flames, “and I’m a better person for being wrong.”
Mrs. Prince nodded her head in agreement, and I saw they had a point. He couldn’t get in much trouble with a Bible in one hand and his wife’s knee in the other.
I DROVE TO MR. and Mrs. Prince’s Kingdom Hall the following Sunday morning and was surprised to realize I’d passed it a hundred times without noticing. I pondered how often we fail to see what’s right in front of us because we aren’t looking.
But for the sign advertising it as “Kingdom Hall,” the building looked like it could be an office; it was concrete with glass doors. Mrs. Prince waited for me inside. She looked beautiful: her outfit, jewelry, and nails were perfectly matched, and all around her were men and women dressed to the nines. It reminded me a little of the Baptists—sadly, without the hats.
I’d done well to change out of my frog pajamas.
Mrs. Prince introduced me around. “This is my mother . . . and my grandmother . . . and my cousins.” Three generations of lovely African-American women hugged me in welcome, but Mrs. Prince’s grandmother took a particular interest in me. She looked up intently through her spectacles as I spoke, her presence stately despite her cane.
“I, too, conducted a spiritual search when I was your age,” she informed me, taking my hand. “I found Jehovah at the end of it.”
“And here we all are,” laughed one of the cousins.
They are so kind, I thought. Of course Mrs. Prince is a Jehovah’s Witness. What else could she be?
“If you earnestly seek the truth and study for yourself,” added Grandma, “you’re sure to find it. I remember how moved I was when I found Jehovah for the first time.” She closed her eyes in remembrance. “I knew in my heart this was the truth.”
The unspoken end of her statement was that if I searched hard enough, I, too, would find Jehovah’s truth. Throughout the service—which was held in a simple, large room with padded chairs, a stage, and a pulpit—I was troubled by this question: Why do so many people believe that if I seek the truth with an open mind, I’ll end up thinking exactly as they do?
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be a Jehovah’s Witness; they were very nice people. I could imagine a pleasant future of spiritual adoption and potluck suppers with this kindly family, where we would eat seven-layer salad and laugh at my days of Thirty by Thirty seeking. But I knew I didn’t ever want to think about spirituality within a self-sustaining system again. Life isn’t a multiple-choice game show, with Regis Philbin demanding, “Is that your final answer?”
After the service’s conclusion, the Prince family surrounded me once again for a round of warm good-byes. Mary’s grandmother tugged my coat and gestured for me to lean down so my face was close to her own.
“Do all the seeking you need to, dear. But when you talk about your journey, make sure you tell everyone that you found truth here.”
I thought of the kindness her family had shown me, her daughter and son-in-law’s tireless commitment to Jehovah, and the depth of their dedication. They knocked on doors several evenings a week, after working full-time jobs during the day. At every door they risked rejection and ridicule. Had I ever been that committed to anything so selfless?
“I’ll do that,” I said, covering her hand with mine. “I promise.”