Welcome to the Between: Chapter 6

The Woman of Faith

This is the sixth installment of eight in an anthology series, all taking place in the fictitious Between. Read Chapter 1, here. Read Chapter 2, here. Read Chapter 3, here. Read Chapter 4, here. Read Chapter 5, here.

Temperance remembers sitting in her daddy’s church as a little girl.

His booming voice would be echoing off the walls of the old gymnasium that they’d dragged folding chairs and a podium into every Sunday, hoping the simple formalities would be enough for God to show up.

She remembers every word to “Come Thou Fount”, “Amazing Grace”, “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms”, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and countless other hymns that washed over her from the harmonies of her daddy’s 12-string Yamaha guitar week after week, year after year.

But what’s that old saying? Something like, “You can be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead.”

At four years old, Temperance lost part of herself. Even as an adult, she never liked talking about how.

She could only bring herself to talk about it in figurative language from the same pulpit that her father had used, mimicking that same exemplum-style delivery that she grew up with over time.

“Do you remember the old story of Adam and Eve, how God created Adam and then He created Eve out of Adam’s rib and lived with them in the Garden of Eden like a little happy family? Well, of course, we know Adam and Eve ruined that. God gave them the Tree of Life, right? All the food and sustenance they could ever want just right there for the taking.

“But there was that second tree,” she continued, fully aware she’d become a carbon copy of her father giving one of his sermons. “The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And God said, ‘Please, my children. Have anything you want off of the first tree. But do not ever eat of the second tree. It will only bring you suffering, and after, you will surely die.’

“Yet, all it took was a few whispers from a serpent, and it says that Eve took a bite of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Then, she convinced Adam to do the same. And so, the story goes that humanity fell, and they were banished from the Garden of Eden forever.”

After these words, she took a pause. One that was entirely planned, though the way she so convincingly patted imaginary sweat from her forehead — as if the Holy Spirit itself burned inside of her and was pouring out in her words like fire — left the audience with no suspicion of the truth.

“Many of you have asked me about my testimony. And the truth is, I may never be in a place with my walk with God and man where I feel comfortable revealing those details in raw fashion to any ears but His.

“However, if I may, let me use some elements of God’s story to hold perhaps a dim light to the truth of my own.

“Imagine for me, that the roles of the story were reversed. What if it was Adam who had talked to the serpent. And instead of Eve plucking the fruit from the cursed tree, the serpent and Adam worked in tandem, like brothers in arms in order to gently knock down the finest looking one, barely ripe.

“And after taking his first bite, Adam thought back to existence before Eve. That loneliness that burned inside of him then. And in remembering that feeling, suddenly that newfound critical thinking he had absorbed kicked in.

“He knew God’s words. He knew He kept his word.He knew he’d be banished from the garden forever now.

“But Eve wouldn’t be. She was still completely innocent.

“She was still like a child.

“But Adam in his desperation took the fruit he had bitten into, and he found Eve. And though she tried to fight him — she kicked, she threw all of her weight wildly around in all directions, and she even tried to scream — the second she opened her mouth, he forced that fruit into it. And as her cries out to God were muffled by it in her throat and Adam’s hand covering her mouth, its curse dissolved into her being — damning and tainting her forever, just like Adam. …”

The rest of her sermon skids back into the cliche of the power of forgiveness and strength through the Lord that she decided she had to tack on to the end in order to call what she was doing actual preaching that Sunday instead of admitting that her therapist had stopped returning her calls due to missed payments and she just needed to get some things out.

She’d keep doing that kind of thing up until that congregation buried her in the same cemetery, Graceland, they stood consoling her when she placed the first batch of dirt on her daddy’s casket.

She didn’t know if she still had faith in the end. All of her life that secret bitterness that God let her be raped so young festered in her gut like a child she could never birth.

It just grew inside her until it was all she could feel.

Sure, she still stood at the pulpit. But her heart and soul remained in bed on Sundays.

For her, the Between is a Catch-22.

On one hand, it proves that God is up there somewhere and has been all along, just watching. That elusive fact she had only tried to find with a fading lamp all her life is an absolute, undeniable reality she exists in without question now.

Yet, it has never made her fall down on her knees and beg for forgiveness.

The hymns that still play over and over in her unaging mind in a harmonious tone accompanied by a booming bass voice don’t compel her to speak to that indifferent man hiding behind the static screen He’s turned towards her that she trudges along beneath.

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,

She doesn’t have any desire to be the one to start a conversation.

prone to leave the God I love;

He knows where she is.

here’s my heart; O take and seal it;

She knows where He is.

seal it for thy courts above.

That’s all there is to it.