32

CASEY

Because I have housemates, there is never a time when I can take off my makeup and see Casey Cox. I have to leave my eyes smudged and black, like some heroin addict who woke up in a gutter. At first it was messy at night, and I didn’t like the feel of it. My eyes continually itched and I longed to wipe them clean. But now I’ve gotten used to it.

Sunday morning I wake up early, craving something to fill the emptiness in my soul, so I decide I’ll go to church again. I don’t have nice clothes, but I put on a pair of black pants and a shirt that doesn’t look too bad, and I apply my heavy makeup and tousle my hair. I go downstairs and start toward the door, when Miss Naomi stops me.

“Where are you going, honey? Not to work on Sunday, I hope.”

I turn around. “I thought I would go to church.”

Her face changes. “Church? Hold on a minute. I want Lydia to go with you.”

I don’t know what to say, but I stand there for a moment, trying to think of a way out. She runs up the stairs, leaving her grandson at the bottom looking up at me.

I smile at him. “What are you playing with?”

He shows me the dump truck he’s pushing on the floor and chatters in his minion-speak, using words and sounds I can’t quite understand. As I wait for whatever it is that Miss Naomi is doing, I check my watch. I’m going to be late if I wait much longer to leave.

I imagine she’s upstairs, trying to get her daughter out of bed, but the likelihood of Lydia agreeing to go to church with me is pretty slim. I just hope her mother will hurry and figure that out.

After a few minutes, she comes back down with Lydia dragging behind her, looking like a zombie. She’s wearing jeans and a pullover shirt that her mother probably dug out of a drawer and forced her to throw on. Her eyes are bloodshot and puffy. When she gets down the stairs she looks at me. “Church? Really?”

“Thank you for waiting, sweetheart,” her mother says to me. “She’s been wanting to go to church, haven’t you?”

“More than anything,” Lydia quips. “I’ve told her that in multiple nonversations we’ve had.”

“Um . . . what about Caden?”

“I’ll keep him here with me,” Miss Naomi says. “Just you two go on and have a good time.”

“Right,” her daughter says in a bitter tone. “But I need coffee.”

Miss Naomi runs to the kitchen and comes back with two Styrofoam cups, hands them to us as we start out the door. I take mine gladly and drink it down as I get into my car. Lydia plops into the passenger seat.

“Why under God’s blue heaven would you suggest that we go to church when I was sleeping?”

“I didn’t suggest that,” I say. “I told your mother I was going and she insisted that I wait for you.”

“She told me she wouldn’t give me gas money unless I went. Tyrant. It ought to be against the law.”

As I drive, I try to push back my disappointment that she’s going with me. I hope it doesn’t call more attention to me. I had hoped to sneak in the back again after it had already started so that I wouldn’t have to speak to anyone. I want to blend in. I want to see if I can capture that feeling again. But I doubt I’ll be feeling anything with Lydia along, except maybe irritation.

We’re ten minutes late when we get to the church. I find a parking place, then hurry toward the door. She lags behind. I tell her she can sit outside on the steps if she doesn’t want to participate. I won’t tell her mother. But she comes inside, a bitter look of annoyance on her face, her arms crossed as if to deny anything suggesting vulnerability.

We slip into the back row as they’re singing a song I’ve never heard. I watch the screens at the front of the room for the words, hungrily taking them in, not singing but playing those lyrics through my mind, trying to understand. I glance at her standing beside me, looking around, disengaged. At least she’s being quiet, which is something.

We sit down after the singing and they pass the offering plate. Our section leaders start at the front of our section, working their way back. By the time it gets to our row, there are paper bills stacked on each other, a twenty at the top. When it’s passed to Lydia, she plucks the twenty out of the stack and wads it in her hand.

I gasp as I grab the plate. “You can’t do that!” I whisper.

“Why not?” she says. “I thought it was for the needy.”

“It’s stealing!” I whisper. “Put it back!”

I can see that she has no intention of doing that. She only grunts as if to say, “Make me.” I’m thinking her maturity must’ve stalled somewhere around the age of eight.

I’m still holding the plate, and the guy looks our way and reaches out for it. But I can’t give it to him until Lydia puts the twenty back. When I realize she’s not going to, I grab my wallet out of my purse, pull a twenty out, and put it in the plate. The usher smiles as he takes the plate.

I’m mortified. My face burns red as I sit through the next few minutes of the service. I offer a silent prayer asking forgiveness for letting that happen. Surely God has some law that stealing from him has to be punished right here in the sanctuary. Will lightning come through the window? I can almost smell an electric charge as we sit here.

“Enough with the hypocriticism,” she whispers.

This must be another one of her combo words, but I can’t be a hypocrite when I never claimed to be anything. “I didn’t criticize you,” I whisper back.

Eventually, Lydia nods off to sleep, so I lock onto the preacher’s words and try to absorb their meaning.

“We’re not talking about some mythical messiah who used to live two thousand years ago,” he says. “We’re talking about a living Savior. What is he doing right now? He’s sitting at the right hand of God, making intercession for us.”

I’m not entirely sure what intercession is, but it’s as if the preacher reads my thoughts.

“What is intercession?” he asks, then his voice dips almost to a whisper. “It’s prayer. Jesus is praying for you. John 1:3 says, ‘All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.’ All things. The whole world! Yet what is he doing right this minute? He’s praying for you. Translating your prayers to his Father. Listening to what’s on your heart.”

I try to imagine the Christ who died on the cross and was raised from the dead, now sitting on a throne next to his Father, talking to him about me. If that’s true, then maybe my prayers aren’t random thoughts that fly into the ether, then vanish if someone doesn’t happen along to catch them.

“When you pray,” the preacher goes on, “it’s like you’re whispering into the ear of God himself. None of those prayers go unheard. They might not be answered like you hope or think they should be. You might ask for a car, and God gives you a bicycle. Turn with me to Romans 8 and look at something with me.”

I pull the Bible out of its pocket on the back of the seat in front of me and open it, looking for Romans. I have no idea where it is, but I quickly find the index, then make my way to it.

The preacher waits for us all to get there, then says, “Let’s start with verse 26. ‘In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.’”

The words are like balm to me, exciting me in deep places of my soul, making me want more. I look up, waiting for the preacher to go on.

“What is he saying? Paul is telling us that we sometimes pray for a new car, when Jesus knows that what we really need is self-worth. So Jesus takes those prayers that we pray for whatever we think will make us happiest, and he translates them into what really will make us happiest. Look at the next part of that passage. Verse 28 says, ‘And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God.’ How many things?”

The congregation answers, “All things.”

“Some things?”

I smile and answer with them. “All things.”

“Listen, people, that’s how your prayers work. They come out of your mouth the way you want them to happen. Jesus translates them to the Father, telling him what it is we really need. And whatever happens, he makes sure that all things that happen are for our good, if we love him and—look at that last part—‘are called according to His purpose.’ That means that our very existence is for his purposes. That our lives have meaning to him. Called means invited. Chosen. We’ve been chosen for a purpose, and it’s for our good. Does that just blow your mind, or what?”

Yes, it blows my mind. I don’t know why I’m wiping tears, but I’ve never felt quite like this before. Sitting here in this place gives me the most peace I’ve felt in years—maybe a decade, maybe more. I haven’t really had peace since my dad died. There’s been a bitterness eating a hole deep in me, burning the edges of my insides. But here I feel as if that heaviness is lifted, as if I can think more clearly. I can feel a power greater than me working right in front of me . . . and even through me.

Maybe God does care about me after all.

The service is almost over, and the congregation is on their feet, singing the last song, when I grab Lydia’s arm and tug her out. She slept through the sermon, then came awake when the singing started again. Now she blinks at me sleepily. “You gotta be somewhere?”

“I just don’t like the traffic,” I say as we get to the foyer and push through the doors.

“You know, you didn’t have to put that money in. Twenty bucks won’t break an outfit like that.”

I don’t answer her, just walk down the stone stairs a few steps ahead of her, trying not to lose the feeling.