The Great Thirst Part One: Prepared

by Mary C. Findley

  Chapter Ten – Big Changes

  Keith walked through the school building early on a Monday morning. A work crew came around the corner, pushing their way through their plastic screens, startling him.

  “School starts in half an hour, Mac. You’re cutting it close,” he said to the foreman.

  Mac made a face as he wiped sweat from under his hard hat. “Yeah, no kidding. Your dad said those gripers have already filed papers at the courthouse about unsafe conditions here, though, so we ain’t got no time to screw around. We spent all night jack-hammering all the old concrete out so we can put in the forms tonight when the building’s clear again.”

  “I thought at the last board meeting they were satisfied when we showed them the plans and the work schedule. You were supposed to be able to start concrete work at Thanksgiving break.”

  “C’mon, you think people like that are ever satisfied?” Sam Ewing brushed cement dust off his pants before stepping off the dropcloth and ducking under the “No crossing – Work Zone” signs. “They move into a town and start makin’ trouble. We oughta make trouble for them – move ’em out.”

  “Take it easy, Sam,” Keith looked around. The “people like that” – the Holden, Sheldon, and Gregory families, to be exact, had inserted themselves into the whole school scene, volunteering as teacher aids, bus monitors, cafeteria helpers – he had been seeing them everywhere, all times of the day. Sure enough, Mrs. Holden came in the front door across from the latest construction project. The five men on the crew all made zipping motions across their mouths and stood up a little straighter as the impeccably-dressed woman stopped short and stepped back away with a look of disgust.

  “Be careful with that cement dust!” she chided. “My son Ruan has terrible allergies.”

  Sam glared at her and beat on his pants, sprinkling white all over her perfectly-creased black slacks. “Oops,” he said, and walked off.

  “I want that man fired!” Mrs. Holden snapped at Mac.

  “If I fire him, your unisex bathroom won’t get done til January, ma’am,” Mac replied. “I’ve already lost three men from my crews because you and your friends snipe at them like they was your personal enemies, keepin’ them from doin’ their work. They got other jobs to go back to. They wanted to help the school. So I suggest you re-route yourself and your son and steer clear of this-here high-allergen zone. Or should we put up warning signs, in international symbols? Would that help?”

  “Very well, I will simply share my concerns with Mr. Bradley.” Mrs. Holden crossed her arms and spun on her heel.

  “Mrs. Holden,” Keith called out, catching up with her, “I’m sorry about Sam. He’s kind of hard to get along with to begin with. But he’s a good worker. They’re all good men. I’ve known them since I was a kid. You have to have a little patience and understanding.”

  “Well, you’re not the Mr. Bradley I meant, but I suppose I can speak to you about this, since you seem to have much more influence around here than those of us poor new parents whose concerns are being ignored.”

  “We’re not ignoring your concerns at all. The crews are working as fast as they can. We have three different construction projects going on, but we have to have school, and that brings everything to a halt.”

  “I’m not just talking about the construction. Mr. Sheldon is a registered Dietician, and his wife is a yoga vegan health practitioner. They have both spoken to that cafeteria manager repeatedly about how unhealthy your lunches are here. She refuses to change the menus at all, and keeps saying she’s ‘fed children for fifty years’ and doesn’t ‘need them sticking their noses in’. Mr. Sheldon would be an excellent replacement for her. She ought to retire anyway.”

  “Mrs. Hendricks is a registered dietician also. She gets her menus straight from the state. They’ve changed a lot just since I was a student here.”

  “You see? That’s exactly the problem!”

  “The problem is that Mrs. Hendricks is a dietician also, so you can’t shove her aside and get Mr. Sheldon into her job?” Keith was starting to lose patience.

  “How dare you accuse us of trying to shove people aside? You’re prejudiced because these people are familiar and we’re strangers. The problem is this cronyism; this good old boys mentality. You people all know each other, you’ve never been out of this stupid little town, and when new people come here you all close ranks and spew hate at us. Our suggestions are ignored, or we’re told to be patient, but this town’s people have put up with dinosaur methods too long.

  “For another example, I keep hearing that your PE teacher also works at the vo-tech. He isn’t able to get to school for all the days he should have classes. I’ve heard you miss classes you should be teaching to cover for him. Mrs. Sheldon could fill that gap with yoga classes. No one has even thought of asking her. There are others here who would embrace change if you people didn’t keep getting in the way.”

  “Mrs. Holden!” Talia came in the front door, dressed in a dark turquoise suit, her hair in a French braid, wearing her black-rimmed glasses. Keith wanted to laugh at her transformation. Joana had given her a lot of tips, since she had been a chief financial officer for a bank before her illness. Talia had become quite a terror in the classrooms, and if she wasn’t still so for cryin’-out-loud cute behind those glasses, Keith would be afraid of her too. She marched up to the woman, swinging her briefcase.

  “Ms. Ramin!” Mrs. Holden turned, startled.

  “Your daughter Lynette was late for my first period class twice last week,” Talia said sharply. “She told me it was because you kept her waiting when your yoga class ran over. Your home is outside the bus route, which you knew when you moved here, so you are responsible to see to her timely transportation to school. How can your yoga class be more important than your daughter’s education?”

  “But I – I have to bring Carol – I mean, Mrs. Sheldon – because we carpool on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and she was getting us in the zone with our meditations. You should come to the class! I’m sure you have as many stresses in your life as we do! Yoga expands your mind to so many possibilities!”

  “How would it look if I was constantly late for my own classes? I only wanted to be sure you know why she has to serve detention today.”

  “Detention? Lynette? She can’t stay after school today. I have to go straight home to prepare for the dinner party I’m hosting. I can’t wait here to drive her. You never sent a notice home, so we will have to reschedule her detention to a time that’s convenient for me.”

  “Lynette just told me when I saw her outside that she forgot to give you the notice. She was practically crying. But I told her it’s perfectly okay. Kids forget things. It’s a good thing I left you three voicemails, and you have messages in the volunteer center as well. I checked. You never picked them up.

  “Lynette had better be in the detention room at three, or she will have more consequences. She told me it wasn’t fair, since you were the one making her late, but I reminded her that life sometimes isn’t fair. Mr. Bradley, aren’t you supposed to be down with the buses?” Talia turned on Keith, looking positively fierce.

  “I am,” he admitted, and strode off, listening to Mrs. Holden splutter to nobody as Talia went off in the opposite direction.

  Keith marveled at how the Bible as Literature class had become the talk of the school. Kids were begging to sign up, even though drop-add was long over. It certainly wasn’t all smooth. The kids wanted to argue their opinions of what Bible passages meant, or reject and deny anything that they didn’t agree with. They thought they knew all about the myths in the ancient literature examples Talia brought up. The problems arose when they kept trying to make backwards comparisons, saying things like Samson was the same as Hercules.

  “Most of the ancient world religions were made up by secularists,” Talia explained one day.

  “What's a secularist?” a student asked.

  “Someone who says he doesn't want religion to have anything to do with
his life,” Keith supplied.

  “You mean an atheist?”

  “No,” Talia corrected. “A secularist is a person who wants to have complete control over people. He conquers people and invents a religion that has a hero-king-god at the head. He makes them all worship the same way. He uses priests to help control people. He won't tell anyone this openly, but he gets people believing that he is that hero-god, or descended from him. Nimrod was probably the first secularist after the Flood. He's most likely responsible for inspiring the myths about Gilgamesh in Mesopotamia, Herakles in the Indus Valley, and other hero-ruler-gods around the world.”

  “Religions are fake? Some guy just made them up to get people to worship him?”

  “Look at Plato's Republic, just as one example,” Talia said. “He told how to set up the perfect government. The most important part, he said, was to tell children stories about gods and goddesses and heroes that taught exactly what would make people grow up as perfect government servants. And he said it was vital that the government keep their plans a secret from people so they wouldn't have a chance to rebel until it was too late. It was all about making the government into god for the people.”

  “Doesn't that apply to the Bible too, though?” someone asked. “It has all those laws, lots more than the ten commandments, and said people had to keep them. Who's to say Moses didn't make all that stuff up so he could control people?”

  “That idea didn't work out too well for Moses, did it?” Keith asked. “The people kept telling him he wasn't going to rule over them, kept complaining, kept rebelling, kept failing to keep the law, long after Moses' time.”

  “God wrote the Bible because He loved us and wanted to teach us the best way to live,” Talia said. “He wanted us to know what was best for us and help us learn to love Him.”

  Keeping up with their sometimes left-field questions and earnest concerns was exhausting as time passed. Keith and Talia had adopted a tag-team approach, where they would switch up the discussion leader unexpectedly. Sometimes that was enough to throw the kids off guard. Keith was surprised over and over again at how any trace of Talia’s first week scatter-brained behavior had vanished. He had seen this girl – this woman – burst into tears praying for these kids with Joana, but her resolve never cracked in the classroom.

  “Mr. Bradley, you can’t say there are no contradictions in the Bible!” LeAnna exclaimed during a Monday class in October. “Look right here! People say Paul wrote a whole bunch of the Epistles, but right here in Romans 16:22, it says, I Tertius, who wrote this epistle, salute you in the Lord.”

  “And what does it say in Romans 1:1, LeAnna?” Talia countered.

  This girl was ready. “Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God. But that don’t mean he wrote it. It means … like … from the office of Paul, like those paintings that were from the school of Titian, but Titian’s students painted them. People trusted Paul, so other people could write stuff and say it was from him, and everybody understood. Then at the end, they explain that somebody else wrote it.”

  “Do you know what an Amanuensis is, LeAnna?” Talia asked.

  “Amanuwhatsis?”

  “An amanuensis is a person who writes things down for another person. You’re right about Paul’s letters being ‘from the office of Paul’, because he was rarely able to write them himself. But that doesn’t mean Tertius was the author of Romans. Paul was. Some scholars believe that Paul wasn’t physically able to do much writing himself. If you carefully study the epistles, you’ll find places where Paul says he wrote a letter himself. In one place he says you see how large a letter I have written to you with my own hand. Many people believe that the thorn in the flesh Paul wrote about was that he was legally blind. He could see some, but if he wrote for himself it was going to be in big letters.”

  “Wait, you mean Paul was handicapped, and nobody healed him?” George demanded. “People were healing people all over the place. Paul healed people himself. They were passing around handkerchiefs, and casting shadows on people. How come Paul never got healed?”

  “That’s the biggest reason I can think of not to believe the Bible,” grunted Dave. “The guy who kept telling everybody else to believe in God didn’t have enough faith to get healed himself? Phooey.”

  “Dave, if you had read your assignment, you would already know what the Bible says about that,” Keith said. “Everybody get over to 2 Corinthians 12. Hurry it up. Okay, now, Dave, read verses 7-10. Stand up, man. This is the Word of God.”

  “And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.”

  “Oh, my God,” somebody somewhere in the back of the room breathed.

  “He didn’t get healed, but he got more power from God in exchange?” Rikki asked.

  “And he took pleasure in that – whatever it was? That bad thing God made him keep?”

  “What’s that mean, when I am weak, then I am strong?” Lynette asked. “What about all those sayings people have, telling you to stay strong, to be empowered, not to be weak? Why does the Bible say the opposite of what everybody else tells us? My mom tells me all the time, Don’t be weak. She quotes stuff like what we're reading from those other religions. She says stuff about visualizing success and positive energy. I don’t understand. I want to believe the Bible, but it contradicts everything else I hear.”

  “Oh, baby, everything has to come from God,” Talia said. “Everything has to be about God. You can’t think success in your head. You don’t have any positive energy. God’s the power source.”

  “And success is what He said to Joshua, back in the Old Testament,” Keith put in. “Everybody turn to Joshua 1:7-9. Everybody stand up and listen.

  “Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law, which Moses my servant commanded thee: turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper withersoever thou goest. This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success. Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.

  “Success is from God. From knowing His Word. Study it all the time. Don’t stop. Don’t ever stop. The world belongs to the Prince of the Power of the Air. It’s not going to help you. It’s going to keep you down.”