Chapter Nineteen – “You Never Had a Choice”
Keith and his dad invited Talia to accompany them to see the matriarch of the Bradley family. She had to buzz them into her hallway, and when they rounded the corner she stood in her doorway across from the common room, peering at them from over her walker.
“Who is this lovely young lady?” Mrs. Bradley asked. Talia held out her hand but the older woman pulled her into an embrace.
“This is Talia Ramin, Grandma,” Keith said as they followed her past a tiny kitchen into the living room. His grandmother didn’t give any indication of remembering their previous conversation about her.
“How do you do, Mrs. Bradley?” Talia said. “It’s such an honor to meet you.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s an honor to meet you!” Talia raised her voice.
“An honor to meet me?” Grandma Bradley picked up the glasses that hung on a chain around her neck as she dropped down into her chair. She peered around at all the nervous faces and zeroed in on her son. “Joshua, what is going on here?”
“Grandma, I told you I help teach that class, The Bible as Literature,” Keith began when his father hesitated.
Her eyes shifted focus to Keith. “Yes, you did, and I told you what I thought of that at the time. Bible as Literature means ‘Bible no different from any other Literature’. I thought you thought the same. I thought you both thought the same.”
“Mom,” Joshua said, “Talia and Keith have been teaching this class in a way that I believe truly honors the Scriptures and the Lord. People are being taught truth, and we are seeing people get saved and start reading their Bibles on their own.”
“Well, that’s a good thing. But on the phone you said you wanted to talk to me about giving you my Bible and your father’s Bible because the school needs money. So what has all this got to do with my Bibles, and the school needing money?”
“We got grants for turning in reports on the class, Mrs. Bradley,” Talia explained. “Mr. Bradley is using the money to fix up the school.”
“That sounds like a good thing, too,” Mrs. Bradley said. “Wait, what kind of reports are we talking about? Are they making you tell them how people are studying the Bible?”
“Well, yes, kind of,” Keith replied.
“What does ‘kind of’ mean?”
“Mom, let me tell you the whole story,” Principal Bradley finally said. He explained about the class records, the new parents, the complaints, the upgrades the school needed, and then the news about the next phase of the project.
“Like a deer stepping into a net,” Mrs. Bradley said softly. She looked around at all three of them. “We give up our Bibles, what do we get in return? Because they must have said we get something in return.”
“We don’t give up our Bibles. We just let them scan them, right at the school, and they give everything back,” Talia insisted. “It becomes an online repository. Everything is there, on the internet, and we can download whatever we want, wherever it comes from.”
“So what they give back is this repository. Everything everyone ever wrote or thought or said about the Bible. We can look at it online anytime. Show me what it looks like,” Mrs. Bradley ordered.
Talia pulled out her tablet and brought the website up. She swiped through a few screens and Mrs. Bradley nodded.
“I see this has been done in other places. It’s been done with other religions, too. How long has this been going on, Talia?”
“I’m not sure,” Talia admitted. “I heard about it last spring, right before I graduated.”
“Grandma’s right, though, this is an awful lot of material to be collected in such a short time.” Keith frowned.
Principal Bradley said, “Maybe it’s just trickling down to us. People have become so used to the government telling schools what to do, that this voluntary program seemed like restoring our freedom. But I guess it was a Trojan Horse. We let this slip in under the radar.”
“You’ll have to comply,” Mrs. Bradley said. “You don’t have a choice. You never had a choice, once those people were planted here to start complaining.”
“Planted here?” Principal Bradley echoed.
“Of course,” Mrs. Bradley replied. “It’s been coming down the road for years. All this talk about safety. They can’t attack faith directly. The hardcore ones keep trying, but it never works. A few people still truly believe in God. A few more say they do, and a lot more have a warm feeling that they think is belief in God. All those people get a bad feeling when people try to attack believers or the Bible.
“That’s good, in a way, because they’ll try to defend our rights and protect real believers in a stumbling sort of misguided way. But in the end, everything crumbles when anybody mentions safety. Tell them, Keith. Explain why you became ‘Mr. Safety’.”
Keith flushed. “Grandma … What does this have to do with our problem?”
“Humor me,” his grandmother replied.
“Well, okay. I felt like I could help kids be safe if I was there ... In the bus parking lot, walking around the halls, showing up in the bathroom. It’s not only about keeping kids from running in front of a bus. It’s grabbing that locker door when the bullies try to shove a smaller kid in. It’s throwing a cigarette or a reefer in the toilet. It’s hollering out, ‘Hey! Stop that!’ when something’s going on that’s wrong. It’s never, ever standing by and doing nothing.”
“There you are. That’s good, Keith, and that’s Christian. But there are other people who have a different definition of what’s safe and right and what’s unsafe and wrong.”
“Doctors are supposed to ask questions about whether we have guns in our houses and how they’re stored,” Principal Bradley muttered. “They demand more information, more paperwork, more control, because people get killed with guns. Guns are unsafe.”
His mother nodded. “Keep going.”
Talia said in a low voice, “They say, stay safe. Carry a condom, get a morning after pill, or kill those cells that aren’t a baby if you make a mistake. It’s just being safe, and protecting yourself.”
Mrs. Bradley patted Talia’s shoulder. “Now you’re starting to understand.”
“Safety means we have to accept ‘alternate lifestyles’, and not just accept them, but promote them,” Keith continued. “We have to teach about them in school and not even bring up normal husband and wife, father and mother. We might even make people feel unsafe, if their families are not like that. Homophobic is the same as racist.”
“And now they’re telling you they’re going to keep our Bibles safe, and all of our studies about them,” Mrs. Bradley said. “Even the people who might not use the internet – they’re being invited and included. Everything will be free to view on the internet, anytime people want to pick up that tablet. It’ll be right at the tips of everyone’s fingers. Nothing will be lost. Nothing will be in danger of loss. It’ll always be right there. You say that no one has censored what you can teach about the Bible in this class of yours?”
“Exactly, Grandma,” Keith answered. “We are freely preaching The Word. Kids are getting saved, and so are their family members. They are earning their own money to get their own Bibles. You should hear Talia knock down their opinions and backwards ideas. She’s amazing.”
“I believe she is.” Mrs. Bradley looked from Keith to Talia. Both of them blushed. “Well, for now, the Word is being preached freely, souls are being saved, the saints are being edified, and you are being obedient to the government and the Lord. These things are in His hands.” She shuffled away into her bedroom and came back with two worn old Bibles in the basket on her walker, along with several thick notebooks.
“Oh … ” Talia touched the objects with great reverence. “These are treasures.” Mrs. Bradley stroked them lovingly.
“They are, but I know I can trust you children with them.” Keith and Talia gathered them up.
“So that’s it?’ Joshua Bradley said incredulously. �
�You believe this is a good thing?”
“I believe …” Mrs. Bradley sank back down in her chair. “I believe that God protects His Word, Joshua, and He spreads it around, and makes it take root in people’s hearts. He always has, and He always will. He can do that, even if all that’s left, to our eyes, is just a little mustard seed’s worth.”
They left Grandma Bradley’s apartment, after she had taken special care to hold out her arms for a hug from Talia. Keith could see her breathing Grandma in.
Keep following the adventure in The Great Thirst Two: Purified
The Great Thirst Part One: Prepared Page 21
