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She lifted her shoulder, not sure what to say. “I watched my mom live what she believed. What she taught us to believe. She made God seem so real that I never thought to question that He wasn’t. I can see Him in my room. I guess I just look at the lake and I can see God in it. Look at the storms rolling in, and I can’t imagine all that just happening. To believe that it just happened out of nothing takes so much more faith than it does to believe that there is a God who controls it all.
“And I suppose the thing that my mom did that really helped me, and where some of my friends went wrong, was that a lot of my friends thought that being a Christian meant you were happy all the time, bad things didn’t happen to you, and if God loved you, then you weren’t going to suffer. My mom made sure that I understood that being a Christian meant bad things probably were going to happen to you, that you were going to suffer, and that God allowed you to in order for you to grow and become more like Him. She emphasized that the hard times were the times where you became more like Jesus or you chose to try to do things without Him.”
“I see.” He took a breath and used his fork to poke around in his box without actually picking anything up and eating it. “In a way, I agree with you, but I can also sit here in my mind and think, did God really want a little boy to go through the things I went through? And of course, there was no one teaching me that those were things that were going to shape me, but as you say that, I realize that they did. Those things did make me stronger. They did form the determination that I had in my heart to become who I am today. Although, I lost God along the way for a while.”
“I think we all do. I mean, not everyone, but we’re human. We want to do things our own way. We get to a point in our lives where we think we can do it without God, or maybe we don’t even make a conscious decision, we just start doing things we want rather than thinking about what God wants. I have. I know a lot of times in my life, I just looked at the choices in front of me and picked the best thing that I thought was going to make me the happiest, or make me the most money, or maybe the most comfortable. I didn’t think about choosing to do the things that God wants me to do. And maybe even more importantly, choosing to not do the things that I know God doesn’t want me to do.”
“For some of us, that means giving up a lot of things.”
“Yeah. Some people think that God is just kind of in the sky and uninterested in us, but He wants every second to be accounted for. Not that we can’t have our rest or relaxation, but we have a tendency to place a priority on resting and relaxing when we’re here on earth to work. Our relaxing time is in heaven.”
“Every seventh day, God commanded us to rest.”
“I think it was God’s way of letting us know that we can’t work all the time. And I do think that God wants us to enjoy ourselves. However we do that. But so many times, enjoying ourselves means sinning.”
“Yeah.” Neither one of them said anything. They really didn’t have to. They’d worked in an office setting for years and knew that after-work drinks often led to after-work other things, things that broke up marriages and destroyed relationships, and even if they didn’t do that, things that were not right.
It was commonplace. Every day. These wicked things that people didn’t even blink at anymore, and in fact, it was the people who didn’t do the wicked things that were looked at as an aberration.
“When I was in the Cities, instead of starting what I was planning on starting, I took the first steps toward closing it all down.”
His words were a shock to her.
“You keep saying things that surprise me. I... Pretty much every time you open your mouth, I can’t believe what you’re saying.”
He laughed. “What are you talking about?”
“You...changed. You’re just...not the same.”
“Isn’t that what was supposed to happen?”
Now he was talking about religion again. Conversion. Being different.
“I hadn’t considered. I... I always thought it was a, you know, you’re gonna look like a monk or something. But you’re right. Since Sunday morning, you’ve been different, and I never thought that was why.”
“Jesus changes people. Maybe sometimes he changes them quickly, and sometimes some of us are a little bit slower, but we change.”
“Yeah. Which makes me wonder if I’ve changed.”
“If you were saved when you were young, maybe it’s not the same because you grow up trying to walk with Jesus, and the growth that you show as you get older will be growth toward Jesus. But there is a big change if you’re older when you get saved.”
“Good point,” she said, knowing that what he said was true. If she had been a Christian since she was young, her whole life should have been building on that foundation. With no great changes necessary. Just small adjustments as she got off course.
“You are okay with the change?”
“You just keep saying things and surprising me. This is the first time since I started working for you that instead of expanding your business, you’re...contracting.”
“I don’t need to do what I’ve been doing. I haven’t been enjoying it for a while. I suppose the time in Strawberry Sands showed me that, and the time in church reminded me that there are other things that are more important. Things that I’ve been neglecting. People. People are important.”
“Exactly.”
“The problem is, I don’t always enjoy being around people.”
“Me, either.”
“But there’s a community in Strawberry Sands, a community of people who help each other. There is no law that says that you have to have millions of people you’re helping. You can just be a blessing to the people around you, even if there’s only fifty or a hundred of them in your community.”
She never thought it through like that, but it was true. People didn’t have to light up the whole world. They only had to light their corner of it.
