Accepting Bible camp was easier after I got a look at the new neighbors. The house behind us had some ancient couple with closed curtains in all their windows. I sure hoped they’d stay closed. The house out my other window was full of good news–bad news. Good news: not a curtain in the place. Bad news: a few windows were broken. Good news: everyone who lived there was naked. Bad news: they were all bats.
After a dinner of chicken-fried steak, macaroni ’n’ cheese, and peas, I took my chair out on the porch and put my feet up where the missing pillar should’ve been. I was armed with a plastic straw and the two paper napkins from dinner. At dusk, the bats started coming out of the house next door. They dove around the streetlight catching moths, mosquitoes, whatever flew. I tore off little pieces of napkin, balled them up, and shot them from the straw high in the air. A bat would dive for it thinking it was a juicy moth, then shoot upward when it realized it had been fooled. I shot dozens of paper bullets in the air. The bats fell for it every time.
Stupid neighbors.
When I ran out of paper, I watched the flicker of TVs in the other houses on the street. We didn’t have a TV. Having a TV and watching fun shows was one of the things I wanted to do in the future. Mom believed TV was a box filled with profane babblers eclipsing the light of Christ. She also said that when the Antichrist came during the End Times, TV was going to be his favorite tool to infiltrate the minds of the unsuspecting. When I thought about it her way, the TVs up and down the street looked less like flickering portals of fun and more like the glowing eyes of the Beast.
Stupid neighbors.
My mother brought her chair outside. I asked her something that had been bugging me. “Why did you unpack my suitcase when you knew I’d be going to Bible camp in a couple days?”
“I didn’t want you thinking of this place as a motel,” she said. “I want you to remember it as home.”
It was weird. She never called any place “home” until we’d been there a few weeks. I didn’t tell her I wouldn’t be spending any time at camp being homesick for the one-pillar doghouse. Especially with no neighbors with curves to covet.
When I asked her about the Mormon temple again, things got wonkier. She quoted a verse I hadn’t heard before. “Never take your own revenge, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”
I asked her if that meant we were going to stop Whac-a-Moling and let God do the whacking from now on.
“It’s not so black and white,” she answered. “There are followers of false prophets whose armies are so vast that God will deal with them Himself. But He still needs us to perform small missions. We’re His guerilla warriors.”
I wasn’t convinced she’d taken the Mormons off her target list. But it was good to know she wasn’t planning some insane mission like scaling the Mormon’s hat-shaped steeple and sticking a couple of horns on it.
Then she told me something that really tweaked my brain. “There are countless ways to reveal God’s glory,” she said. “But the most important is to raise you up as a child of promise, a man of the Good Book. You’re the brightest candle God gave me. It’s my duty to let it shine.”
She’d never talked like this before. It made my insides feel sketchy. I didn’t want to be anyone’s candle. I just wanted to be Billy Allbright, champion mountain biker.
She looked out into the darkness, staring at nothing, or a million things I couldn’t see. It was so still and quiet that when she stood up the scrape of her chair made me jump. She walked stiffly to the screen door, opened it, and turned back. “When I said things would be different here, Billy, I meant it.”
“Does that mean I still have to go to Bible camp?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “But next summer, it’s your decision.”
Later, I lay in bed and watched the bats under the streetlight. Remembering how they dove for the spitballs filled me with a weird wonderment. I was awed by their beautiful, darting flight, and by how dumb some of God’s creatures could be. Diving for spitballs, realizing they were nothing, swooping back up, then falling for it again and again. I wondered if the pleasure I got from watching such beauty and stupidity was the same pleasure God got from watching His human creations. Swooping and diving for worthless things, then soaring back up, only to fall for the same trick over and over.
Stupid neighbors.