New Heart Church

by Jim Barringer

  Chapter Four

  The next night, I found myself at worship band practice again. Danny and I had eaten dinner together, but I hadn’t told him anything about what had happened to me the night before. As it had the last few times, it seemed so silly in the morning. I hoped it would be the last time I felt that way, the final hiccup before all my problems sorted themselves out and I was free to live carefree.

  Practice, just like it had the week before, couldn’t have gone better. The band was tight, we were jiving well and it felt like we were familiar with each other. We went over the songs three or four times each, making doubly sure (for my sake, I’m positive) that we knew what we were doing. Danny prayed, and we dismissed, but before I could make myself scarce, he blocked my way to the door.

  “Want to come over and watch a movie?”

  “Which movie?”

  “Elizabeth and I are thinking Aladdin. Classic Disney.”

  “Man, I haven’t seen that in forever.”

  “So come on over. We’ll make you some popcorn. Maybe afterward you can type up those album reviews you told me you started on.”

  “Hey, good idea. Alright. Let me go get my notebook and I’ll be back.”

  “If you’re not back in five, I’m sending a search party.”

  But there was no need, because I ran down the stairs, stomping like a stampeding elephant, and then ran back up, breathlessly pushing Danny’s door open. He and Elizabeth were parked side by side on the couch, leaving the recliner to me. The lights were already down and the garish blue of the television bathed the room.

  “It’s not often you see a brother and sister sharing a couch,” I observed offhandedly.

  “Really?” Elizabeth asked. “What makes you say that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I just thought it, so I said it. I don’t have any brothers or sisters, so I don’t really know, but I don’t share a couch with my parents.”

  Danny and Elizabeth looked at each other, and Danny shrugged. “Well, we’ve been through a lot together. We’ve had to stick close, physically and emotionally.”

  “What have you been through?”

  “You really want to know?” Danny pressed.

  I shrugged. “Why not?”

  Elizabeth breathed out slowly. “Our family was in a car accident when Danny was fifteen and I was fourteen. Dad was killed. The rest of us were completely fine.”

  “At least physically,” Danny added. “Mom was never the same. She didn’t work, at least not outside the house; she was a writer like I am, but once dad died, she didn’t want to write about anything. Without dad working, there was no money, and finally mom just sent us out on the streets, told us she couldn’t pay to keep us alive anymore.”

  “Oh no,” I said, horrified.

  “So we bounced around to a few friends’ houses,” Elizabeth said. “Stay with one of them for a week, another for two weeks, but they couldn’t keep us long-term. After a couple months we ran out of places to go. So we became homeless. Two teenagers, living on the streets.”

  I imagined the two of them, young and wide-eyed with fear, huddled together under a threadbare blanket, doing what they could to chase away the cold on a night like tonight, and a lump wedged itself in my throat. “What did you do?” I demanded.

  “We did what we had to do,” Danny said simply. He pointed to the TV, where Aladdin was still on the title screen, waiting for someone to push play. “You know that line where Aladdin sings, ‘I steal only what I can’t afford, and that’s everything’? That was us. We stole everything that wasn’t nailed down. Spent the nights in people’s backyards, in alleys, in the lobbies of buildings when we could get away with it. You point to a place in Fort Worth and I bet we slept there at least once. I couldn’t get a job because nobody was interested in hiring someone who didn’t have a car or a driver’s license. But somehow we always had just enough food to stay alive, just enough clothes to stay warm.”

  “We stayed in school,” Elizabeth chimed in. “We didn’t tell anyone what was wrong. A few of our friends knew, but we didn’t let on. We took combs and bottles of hair product to school, washed our hair in the locker rooms or in a sink, shaved wherever we could. We were so embarrassed.”

  “But it wasn’t your fault.”

  “Nobody cares whose fault it is, Eli,” she chided. “Once they know you’re homeless, they look at you funny, and nothing’s the same. It’s humiliating. Dehumanizing. So we put on our best happy faces and tried to make it through.”

  “For three whole years?”

  “Most of high school,” Danny confirmed. “Nobody can possibly explain what it’s like, Eli. To wake up each morning already thinking about food because you didn’t get enough the night before, but not having anyplace to get your food from. To hate yourself for having to steal from people, but not having any other option because if you didn’t then you’d starve. Every. Single. Day. Nine hundred days in a row. Nine hundred days of waking up hungry, either too cold or too hot, washing our clothes with a garden hose and laying them out to dry in a stranger’s driveway after they left for work.” He clenched his jaw, shaking his head in the pale glare of the TV screen, the memories obviously hitting way too close to home. Elizabeth reached over and put her hand on his shoulder, and they were both quiet for a long time.

  “What happened next?” I persisted, not wanting to break the silence, but needing to know how the story ended.

  Danny looked up. “It was Christmas eve, eight years ago. I still remember it like it was yesterday, Eli. Cold night, like tonight, dark out, maybe eight or nine o’clock. The church was all lit up, there were people all inside it. I was waiting outside, working up the courage to go in and steal what I could. I figured the offering plates would be someplace where I could get to them, or there would be purses on the floor I could steal while people were praying. Elizabeth was out behind the building, shivering, and I was furious, you know, that she had to go through all that. I was positive there was no God at all, but I hated him anyway. I went into the building, made for the first purse I saw, and an usher stopped me. He took me into a side office and asked what I was doing.”

  “Did you tell him?” I asked.

  “I told him everything. I don’t know why, because I’d never told anybody everything before. But he kept nodding, kept encouraging me to talk, and no one had ever cared before, just wanted to hear what I had to say. I had so much inside of me, so much anger and disappointment, that it all just came gushing out. I don’t know how long I cried there, and finally Elizabeth came in looking for me.”

  Elizabeth nodded. “I saw them there in that office, Danny crying like that, and I thought the guy had threatened to call the police on him. I thought Danny was fake-crying to get out of criminal charges. I couldn’t imagine that he was actually in tears. But when the man saw me, he told us both about the reason they were there on Christmas Eve, to celebrate the birth of Jesus and the way that Jesus could give us hope and peace, and I couldn’t handle it. I had to have what he was offering. We’d lived so long on our own, trying to be self-sufficient, trying to take care of ourselves, trying to comfort ourselves. Eli, the human soul wasn’t meant to exist like that. We need hope and comfort from somewhere else. Danny and I accepted Christ that night and our lives have never been the same.”

  Again Danny interjected. “One of the first things that usher did – his name was Greg O’Brien, I still talk to him – was to show us this verse in one of Paul’s letters about people who were stealing not stealing anymore, but doing honest work with their hands instead. He talked to all his friends and got me a job at the UPS distribution center, making great money for an eighteen-year-old. I graduated high school in May, and by then I had enough money to pay for a place for Elizabeth and me, and clean food. You wouldn’t believe how much those church people helped us, Eli. They gave us everything. Clothes, bedding, places to
sleep, food, money.”

  “That’s amazing,” I whispered.

  “And now here we are,” Danny said. “I’m a pastor. Elizabeth plays in the praise band. We’re both college graduates and we have careers doing what we love. God has turned everything around for us.”

  “Wait a minute, though,” I protested. “Where was he while you were on the streets? Why did he take so long to help you?”

  “Do you think we would have appreciated what he gave us, if we hadn’t been through a time where we didn’t have it?”

  ‘That’s stupid, though. What kind of God would look down on you while you were homeless and starving and not feel anything, not lift a single finger to help you? Why do you think this is somebody worth worshiping?”

  Elizabeth looked offended, and Danny held up a hand to keep her from lashing out. “I don’t think he felt nothing, Eli. And I don’t think he didn’t lift a finger to help us. He kept us safe, prevented us from being robbed or worse, prevented the police from arresting and separating us. He showed up a lot of times when restaurant owners threw out perfectly good food that we could scrounge. We just didn’t know it was him providing for us.”

  “But you were stealing. Why would he bless your stealing?”

  “The Bible says he has special mercy for the fatherless and the widows,” Elizabeth told me. “It’s not that he was blessing our thievery. He was blessing us in spite of our thievery. Everyone sins, but the strange thing about God is that he’s more concerned with loving people than with punishing them.”

  “And it wasn’t that God was ignoring us, Eli,” Danny clarified. “We were the ones ignoring him. I could have walked into a church at any point during those three years and heard the same message. But I was the one who was too stubborn to give God a chance. What did you want him to do, track me down on the street and have it out with me?”

  “How about not letting your father die in the first place?” I snapped.

  “I’ve yelled at him for that,” Danny said flatly.

  That was not at all what I was expecting to hear, and the quiet calmness of the answer threw off my angry accusation. “You have?” I managed.

  Danny nodded.

  “I didn’t know you could do that. I thought you as a pastor weren’t supposed to get angry at him.”

  “The Bible doesn’t say that, Eli.”

  “Oh.”

  The wind gone from my sails now, I had nothing else to say, but Elizabeth did.

  “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us,” she quoted. “Paul wrote that in one of his letters two thousand years ago, and it’s been true for us.”

  “So the end justifies the means?” I asked skeptically. “God can do whatever he wants as long as it ends well?”

  “He can do whatever he wants, period, because he’s God and we’re not,” Danny corrected. “But think about it, Eli. Elizabeth and I have this amazing testimony about the way that God provided and cared for us, led us to faith in him, and turned our lives around. What kind of testimony would we have if our lives had been hunky-dory and we’d never have problems? How would I be able to stand in front of my church and preach to people who have problems? How would I be able to sympathize with, or extend my hand to, people who have problems? What, do you think God should save everyone from every little problem they have, that he should never let pet cats die or car tires go flat or anything else that will cause people a little grief?”

  “His purpose in life is not to protect us from pain, Eli,” Elizabeth said firmly. “It’s to have a relationship with us. Like Danny said, we were the ones running from him. We were the ones ignoring him. Yet in spite of that he was still waiting for us when we came running into his arms. You can be skeptical all you want, but you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  What could I say to that? “It is a good story,” I admitted. “Thank you for sharing it.”

  “I’m glad you asked,” Danny told me. “Now, I think there’s a movie waiting for us.”

  Oh, how I wanted at that moment to get up and run out of the room. I was so embarrassed at the way I had attacked their faith, and I wanted to be gone, to take my miserable cynicism and be out of their lives forever. But I couldn’t make myself stand. “Sure,” I said. “Can we sing along to the songs?”

  Danny and Elizabeth laughed, a sound of joy that filled the room. “Go right ahead,” Danny said. “Maybe we’ll get Abbie up here so you can do a duet.”

  Thankfully the lights were off, and they couldn’t see me turn red.

  I only half-watched the movie, thinking about the things Danny and Elizabeth had said. I wanted so desperately to believe that there was hope, that I could have peace, all the things they talked about, but those things seemed too wonderful for me. Even the prayer I had offered on Monday had gone unanswered or unheard. But I sighed, eyes on the screen, mind a million miles away.

  Was it possible I was wrong about everything?