Page 16 - WTP Vol. XI #6

Allison did what was expected of her and came forward to the space of carpet that they called the altar at the end of the Wednesday night service. The preacher asked everyone under fifteen to receive prayer and blessings on the new school year; the guest speaker does not know that, in Hawai’i, school starts early in August. Allison stood and went even though she did not want to. As she walked, she felt the counter-pressures
of her exhausted rage toward her own sadness, and the quiet call to walk forward. She learned, on that walk, that she is angry with God; she did not want to betray the force with which He needed to move to reach her, and she knows that she has prayed to no avail for her own solace. The preacher walked down the line of teens, touching each one for a moment before moving on, praying ceaselessly into a wireless microphone. Allison was tenth in line. She was supposed to absorb the prayer, or let it wash over her like a glass of water pour over her head, and walk back. Instead, when the preacher’s hand touched her forehead, the merest suggestion of a hand on her, the Spirit fell, and she was washed away with it, her feet knocked out from under her in the immense shadow of God. She is not naked, but she feels like it. Around her, others are falling backward, caught by others and lowered to the holy ground.
Allison is laying on the floor of the church sanctuary with tears running down her face. She knows the
song the band is playing, but is not hearing it—the information passes through her ears and away from her before she can make sense of what is being asked of her by the too-familiar lyrics. She is covered in a satin sheet that has been cut in half and hand-stitched to keep those who fell under the Spirit’s hand warm in the air conditioning while God says to them what He will. She can feel the satin on her arms, but her jeans are doing most of the warming work. Still, even under
the immense lightness and weight of the music and
the pressure of the Great presence, she is glad for the sheet. It was draped by a kind Aunty with long, graying hair that curls away from her scalp and across her wide back, tamed only by a circlet of leaves, a haku lei, that she made herself just yesterday afternoon. The leaves are starting to yellow around their edges, information Allison noticed when she first walked into the evening service with the other youth group kids. Allison did not want to go; before she left, the deep fear that lived inside her was clawing at her guts like a feral animal. But she is here, and here is where God has decided to make his case. The sheet covering her is small, but almost big enough; it covers her body from ankle to collarbone. Inside the stock-stillness of her Spirit-led paralysis, Allison is questioning how much longer she can endure the life she leads outside of this moment outside time.
If things do not change soon, she will certainly die,
and it will be by her own hand. And if they do, she will become someone else, a person who is held in the limbo of the first day’s deep, dark-shadowed waters.
~
Allison could not tell you when she first felt the deep grip of fear in the pit of her stomach; she does not remember the time before it first came to her. Her earliest memories, those of swing sets and beaches,
are a mix of joy-colored snapshots and the feeling that first threaded itself into the muscles in her abdomen somewhere before she could remember, a second set
of hands knitting her in her mother’s womb. That grip of fear, and its cold surge of unbearable grief, was an infrequent visitor in her childhood, but now, the old friend has come to stay. With it, Allison has learned to fight to keep her thoughts in her gut, where they will not cut into anyone else, where she will not be discovered. Allison was not quiet by nature, but by fourteen, she
is quiet by necessity, holding those hands inside her. She wishes to be forgotten, but she is not, by nature, forgettable, a fact which she fights against with every fiber of her being, a compliment is given by those who want her to be happy she is pretty, smart, kind. She does not care. Given a choice, she would disappear. Instead, she is one of a small cast of characters near the center of her church’s young life, and the small, private Evangelical school that it houses.
She is one of the longest-attending students at this K-12 school, one that prides itself on its humble and faithful origins, founded by two former missionaries- turned-teachers who wanted to save the world from
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Imago Dei
Heidi Turner