Chapter 3

The Gift And The Decision Of Faith

As the congregation sang the last hymn of the morning, Pete slowly made his way to the front of the sanctuary, to be greeted by a smiling pastor and received at long last into church membership. Cajoled by church members too numerous to name, prayed over by family members worried about his eternal destiny, and blamed by his ex-wife, Eleanor, for dissing the church in front of their children every chance he got, Pete had stubbornly beaten back every effort of the pastor to lead him to faith. His favorite strategy was to wrap himself tightly in the strident words of his unbelieving father, “religion is for people who don’t have what it takes to get through life on their own.” Then, one Saturday afternoon, after watching his 18-year-old son walk into the river with the pastor to be baptized, he jumped into the swirling waters himself and asked to be baptized, too. To the astonished pastor, Pete murmured: “Jesus was standing there right beside me on the bank, telling me that he loved me and wanted me.” After the baptisms, Pete and his son returned to shore to the shouting and singing of church members eager to embrace them.

“At long last” were the pastor’s words of greeting to Pete at the next morning’s service, and they produced extended laughter from the congregation when it became apparent that Pete was laughing the most heartily of all. One worshipper, however, was not laughing. Eleanor’s caregiver, Polly, noticed it immediately and made sure to get to her as soon as the service was over. Their brief exchange went this way:

Eleanor: God, Polly, I just want to get away from this place as fast as I can.

Polly: Well if you are going to split, can I at least come with you?

Eleanor: All these years, Polly, all these years. I’ve tried my best to be a good Christian, just like I was raised to be, and had to fight Pete all the way to do it, and now here he comes, like the Prodigal Son, and if anybody could get to a fatted calf, they’d start roasting it right in front of us. Nobody in this church ever, ever, prayed over me the way they did over him, and they’ve never ever said one word of appreciation for my being here. And I’m the one who finally convinced Billy to get baptized; I don’t think Jesus had much of a part in that at all.

Polly: It almost makes you want to live your life all over again, but this time as the lost sheep that Jesus spent all that time trying to find.

Eleanor: I would have at least gotten a hell—sorry, Pol—of a party out of it.

Polly: I guess people like us have to be content with just being reminded that Jesus has always loved us.

Eleanor: Right now that’s comfort of the very small variety.

Polly: I know. (Pause) But is it comfort?

Eleanor: (Sighing) Yes, Pol, it is. It really is. It really, really is.

Among God’s most precious gifts to every human being is the ability to trust and believe, along with the power to exercise that ability without external constraint or coercion. Sometimes, trusting and believing seems to come more from God’s direct action than from either one’s upbringing or from figuring things out for oneself or both. This can make the understanding of God’s workings difficult for people whose own maturing in the faith has come slowly from others’ patient goading and from diligently seeking God’s will on a daily basis, in spite of unanswered questions and insufficient acknowledgment. Shortly after she finished her work with Polly on post-divorce issues, Eleanor became a trained lay shepherd herself. She began ministering to Clarice, a middle-aged woman, who in spite of enjoying her church’s praise as a pillar of faith to everyone around her, told Eleanor that she (Clarice) was “nothing but a fraud.” The reason she gave was that she possessed none of the gifts of the Spirit—healing, prophecy, speaking in tongues—that she had come to view as the marks of true faith. As Eleanor reported to her peer group:

The one thing I most wanted to do with Clarice was give her a good talking to about how growing up Christian is just as good as being swept off your feet by some big, supernatural infusion of grace and power. She doesn’t think she’s good enough, and I just want to keep on telling her that she is until she believes it again. And there I go again, don’t I? There’s more of her in me than I like to admit. Maybe that was what made me so put out with God over Pete’s conversion. I wish God had made being a Christian as easy for me as he made it for Pete.

At this point in the conversation, Polly broke in to share something of the difficult time she had had with a care receiver with whom she worked before meeting Eleanor, a care receiver whose own conversion led her to judge everyone else’s faith by her own, and who could not seem to appreciate how off-putting she was becoming even to her closest friends:

She really seemed hurt when one of her friends told her that she liked her better when she wasn’t a Christian. It was all I could do not to blurt out that I knew just where her friend was coming from! All of a sudden, it seemed like my own faith was being called into question, even though my care receiver had no knowledge of it at all at that point. And I knew that I would have to own up to what was going on in me in my own support group if I were going to be of any help to her.

As the sections to follow seek to show, faith may or may not begin with a deeply felt experience of God, Christ, or the Holy Spirit, but be genuine either way. Faith in its fullness involves not only God but us, too. It is neither pre-ordained, infused, nor prevented by the Creator. An important corollary of this assertion is that faith cannot become a mature faith if we allow it to be coerced by religious authorities bent on abrogating our freedom and responsibility to respond in our own way to God’s presence and will.

Faith as God’s Action

In the Book of Acts, Luke presents a chilling picture of the hate-filled man that St. Paul was before the risen Christ overtook him on the road to Damascus:

Saul, still breathing murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples, went to the high priest and applied for letters to the synagogues at Damascus authorizing him to arrest any followers of the new way whom he found, men or women, and bring them to Jerusalem. (Acts 9:1-2, REB)

However, as Luke goes on to relate, Saul’s literally blinding encounter with the one whom Ananias called “the Lord Jesus” left him a changed man, forever.

This encounter is one of the most powerful expressions in all of Christian history of a faith based upon a deeply inward, personal experience with Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. In Paul’s case, the experience came about through a gracious act of God alone; it was wholly unmerited on his part, and with it came the power to make its life-changing consequences permanent. From the several accounts of Paul’s experience in Acts, many Christians have drawn the conclusion that only those who share his kind of encounter with the Christ at an identifiable moment in time, or at least are earnestly seeking such an encounter if they have not as yet received it, are qualified to call themselves true Christians. Absent a personal experience with Christ of one’s own, these Christians believe, one’s very salvation is still in question and far-off.

Clearly, this particular paradigm of faith has been important from very early times in the history of Christian communities. One especially powerful illustration of it occurs toward the beginning of The Gospel of Luke. A young girl, Mary, is confronted by an angelic messenger, who announces that she is to conceive “the Son of the Most High” by the overshadowing power of God. Overwhelmed, she can only utter, “I am the Lord’s servant; may it be as you have said.” (Luke:1:38) As Luke depicts it, Mary’s response represents a faith gestated in a state of pure receptivity that is as much God’s doing as is her pregnancy itself. Mary is alone the Mother of God, but the kind of faith by which she will nurture her son, many believe, is precisely the kind of faith that God intends for everyone, a faith conceived by the Holy Spirit and born in souls caught up in wonder, gratitude, praise, and unspeakable joy.

As attractive as the Annunciation story is in Christian history, though, the paradigm of faith it contains is even more evident in other testimonies from all four of the Gospels that were in circulation before Luke’s and Matthew’s distinctive narratives of Jesus’ conception and birth. In specific, all of these testimonies have to do with Jesus’ resurrection from the dead following his crucifixion and with his own conveying of faith to his followers as he appeared to them directly. Their particular witness to the kind of faith that comes as a divine gift was expressed very simply, as John reported it, in the astonished words of another Mary, the Magdalene: “I have seen the Lord!” (20:18), and in Matthew’s concluding reference to Jesus standing among the eleven in risen power, creating in them the very trust they would need in order to become his disciples to the ends of the earth and the end of the age. (28:20) For many in the church, there is only one conclusion about faith to be drawn from these narratives of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances. It is that until in some way Jesus makes his presence felt, seen, heard, or touched directly, no one is able truly to believe in him or in the message he came to deliver on behalf of God. According to this paradigm, when Jesus does make himself felt, seen, heard, or touched by someone, though, that person can do nothing except believe, follow, and serve.

The hold of this particular understanding of faith became especially clear to me early in my own ministry, serving as a parish youth director. Each summer, Spiritual Life Camps for our congregation’s upper elementary, middle and senior high, and college age youth became the central focus of my time, energy, preparation, prayers and, after my first days with the campers, dread. It only took two distraught eighth-graders to bring me to this state of spiritual unease.

By mid-week of my first experience as a camp leader, Pattie and Jimmy had fallen into a disturbingly deep state of sadness. The evening worship services were the source of their trouble. Every night, a number of their friends were testifying glowingly about how much their lives had changed since they had felt Jesus coming into their hearts. Three shared that the Holy Spirit had given them the ability to speak in tongues and that they were regularly exercising it in another church fellowship. Another spoke movingly that his experience with Christ gave him the patience and the love he needed to help his older brother cope with the consequences of a spinal cord injury. Other members of the leadership team were very enthusiastic about the positive things that they saw happening in the worship services, which for them were fairly typical for all our camps. Pattie and Jimmy, however, were feeling increasingly bereft of a kind and quality of faith they now believed they should have in order to be “real Christians.” They felt even worse when they realized that many of the youth, who did genuinely seem to enjoy a deeply felt, personal relationship with Christ, looked down on anyone who did not.

At a youth camp that should have been uplifting to their spirits, Pattie and Jimmy came perilously close to a state of despair over what they falsely believed to be an irreparably deficient personal faith. However, they remained receptive to taking a second look at the harsh judgments they were passing on themselves, in the light of a broader understanding of faith that their group leader, whom they especially trusted, offered them just in the nick of time:

You know, there are a lot of people here who believe in Jesus just like you do, without any blinding light or any voice from heaven coming on them. I’m one of them. And I think most people in church are people just like us. Now I don’t know much about what things were like back in Jesus’ day and all that, but I’m pretty sure that he loves us just as much as he loved Saul on that Damascus road.

This young counselor’s moving statement had interestingly different effects on Pattie and Jimmy. By the time the camp ended, Jimmy was sharing without embarrassment that he wanted to be like Jesus in showing care for people, but also that “Jesus hasn’t talked to me yet, and maybe he won’t.” Pattie, on the other hand, woke up the next morning reporting a dream in which Jesus baptized her in the Jordan River, later responded with tears of joy to an altar call, and confessed him there and then as her personal Savior and Lord. While Pattie was receiving her welcome “down front,” I leaned over to ask her group leader what he thought about what was happening. His reply was wise beyond his age: “Maybe telling Pattie she didn’t have to be like the other kids in the group made her feel like she really could.”

Seeing without Believing and Believing without Seeing

As satisfying as it may be for some people to proclaim that genuine faith is an utterly unmerited gift from God which comes only on the wings of ecstatic experiences, this understanding of faith neither was nor is the only one available in the Christian tradition. For one thing, the very same biblical narratives which speak so commandingly of the dramatic appearances that God makes in people’s lives to bring them to faith also make plain that not everyone who finds himself or herself in the presence of deity is personally gifted with faith in the process. For example: “The eleven disciples made their way to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to meet him. When they saw him, they knelt in worship, though some were doubtful.” (Matthew 28:16-17, REB) And: “ . . . there he was, standing among them. Startled and terrified, they thought they were seeing a ghost.” (Luke 24:36-37, REB) To be sure, Jesus closest disciples soon believed, but, as the post-resurrection narratives consistently portray, not before he was able to persuade them that it really was he who has been raised from the dead, e.g.:

But he said, “Why are you so perturbed? Why do doubts arise in your minds? Look at my hands and feet. It is I myself. Touch me and see; no ghost has such flesh and bones as you can see that I have.” They were still incredulous, still astounded, for it seemed too good to be true. So he asked them, “Have you anything to eat?” They offered him a piece of fish they had cooked, which he took and ate before their eyes. (Luke 24:38-43, REB)

Just as there were close followers of Jesus, for whom not even seeing him after his death brought them straightaway to faith, there were others who believed in him without ever having any direct, personal experience of him at all. For these followers of what the earliest Christians called the Way, it sufficed to take the testimony of the original eyewitnesses to the resurrection as sufficiently reliable to warrant their pledging themselves to Christ’s cause in the world without enjoying a personal experience of the risen Christ themselves. Perhaps it was these followers whom Paul had especially in mind when he laboriously recounted the number of people who saw Jesus after the resurrection. (1 Corinthians 15:5-7) By means of his account, Paul sought to remind at least some of the Corinthians that they chose to believe what they could not experience for themselves, because they trusted the witness of people who claimed to see the truth of God with their own eyes.

The Johannine tradition had such believers in mind also. Beginning at John 20:19, there is a striking account of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearance to all but one of the disciples, who were cowering in Jerusalem following the crucifixion. The missing disciple, Thomas, subsequently received the others’ enthusiastic report of seeing the Lord, but then announced to them that he would not believe unless and until he saw the risen Lord for himself. A week later, the writer goes on to say, Jesus reappeared to his disciples, with Thomas now present. He invited Thomas not only to look upon him, but to touch him. Thomas then believed: “My Lord and my God!” (vs. 28) Now, however, the story takes an unexpected turn. Instead of praising Thomas for insisting on seeing things for himself, Jesus extols the virtue of another kind of believer altogether: “Because you have seen me you have found faith. Happy are they who never saw me and yet have found faith.” (vs. 29, NEB)

Christian history strongly suggests that the kind of faith to which Jesus refers in the story of “doubting Thomas” is shared by far more of his followers than is the kind of faith that is born in a once-in-a-lifetime, unforgettable, transforming personal encounter with God, Christ, or the Holy Spirit, such as Saul’s on the way to Damascus. Many people do believe, deeply and genuinely, without seeing the truth of the gospel for themselves. How do they do this? For some, by taking at face value the word of people they trust, that what the church teaches about God is true. By way of examples:

What my parents taught me about God when I was growing up made all the difference to their lives. Why did they believe all of it? Not because they had any blinding light experience. At least, they never told me they had. They believed because everyone who mattered to them believed. And I guess that’ll have to do for me, too.

The church teaches us what we need to be saved. It’s Jesus’ church. So doesn’t it all come to just whether we believe what we’re told or not? That’s been good enough for my family for five generations now, and it’s good enough for me.

Yeah, sometimes I think it might be nice to “get saved” and all that. When I was in high school, a lot of the guys on the team were really into that, and I got pretty down on myself because it didn’t happen to me. It never has. But I still believe in Christ. A lot of people I know today say they experienced him just like the disciples did way back then. I don’t have any reason to doubt their word, but it doesn’t look like I’m ever going to have the kind of experience they say they’ve had. I hope it’ll be enough just to take the Bible seriously, because that’s all that I know to do.

What is especially winsome about these testimonies is their sincerity and simplicity. A little more troublesome is their lack of reflectiveness. Trust like this may be well placed, if church leaders remain trustworthy representatives of Christianity themselves. But this is a rather large “if,” for the history of the church is deeply marred by the actions of leaders who misuse the authority which loyal constituents too eagerly bestow on them. Leaders who abuse the trust of those they lead are the first to reinforce the ideas that Mother Church knows best and that those whom the Lord loves most are those who meekly obey what the leadership says to believe and do. At its worst, this way of looking at faith regards unquestioning loyalty to the church instead of to God as the supreme spiritual virtue. At its best, it should provoke dedicated men and women of faith to demand, at the very least, that their leaders personally believe and act as they teach others to do.

Some people, then, come to faith by taking another’s word for the truth of the Christian gospel and seem to be able to live worthy lives without ever asking questions about, and without ever experiencing for themselves the source, ground and end of the gospel message itself. Others come to faith on the strength of another’s testimony, rather than personal experience, but not without thinking hard about that testimony, weighing it carefully, and determining for themselves that it does indeed cohere with everything else that they believe to be true about God, the world, and human destiny. Luke offers a glimpse into a very early expression of this kind of faith, in the 17^th chapter of The Book of Acts.

After three weeks of teaching in a Jewish synagogue at the Macedonian city of Thessalonica, Paul was besieged by a mob that Jews who did not agree with him recruited for the purpose of stirring up civil unrest. At nightfall, the congregation removed Paul and Silas from the line of fire by sending them to Beroea, approximately 45 miles west and south. Even so, Beroea was not far enough away to dissuade those who were threatened by Paul’s preaching from further hounding him. Nevertheless, Paul found a receptive audience in the Beroean synagogue for what he had to say, “fair-minded” Jews who “received the message with great eagerness, studying the scriptures to see whether it was true.” (Acts 17:11, REB) Luke implies that the Jews in Beroea who became believers did so on the basis, first, of listening to the Christian message and then of making up their minds about it after studying its evidence for themselves.

It is easy to understand how both believers and inquirers can yearn for the kind of personal experience with which God favored Thomas and insist that only such an experience counts as the foundation of true faith. But from the standpoint of the pivotal conversation between Jesus and his disciple summarized above, the insistence is indefensible and the yearning distracting. To alter Jesus’ reported words slightly, those who have not seen but have decided to believe anyway are as blessed as those for whom an overwhelming personal experience makes the decision for them. Here, then, are two very different understandings of what counts as genuine faith. Both carry the approval of the one and the same Christian tradition. As different as these two understandings of faith are in themselves, however, they share something very important in common. Both insist that faith involves decision.

To Everyone Comes the Moment for Decision

From the standpoint of the Christian tradition, every human being’s capacity to respond to God, whether with thanksgiving and trust or with indifference and resentment, is given with his and her created nature and with the freedom included in it. How one chooses to exercise that capacity, however, is finally up to that person alone. God invites, calls, and even summons people to enter into a relationship of gratitude and trust with him, through his saving work in Jesus Christ. But, with the possible exceptions of Moses, Mary, and Saul of Tarsus, God does not compel them to do so. Because our created nature includes both the capacity to give unending thanks and praise to one’s Maker and by God’s own design, the freedom to ignore and to oppose God altogether, faith is and always will be a matter of invitation and choice rather than of coercion and unthinking obedience.

Even those whom God visits in overwhelming experiences like Isaiah’s in the Temple (Isaiah 6:1-9) can choose not to accept the summons the experiences contain. They do not become men and women of genuine faith because of their unique personal experiences of and with God. They become men and women of genuine faith because, standing before “the King, the Lord of Hosts” (vs. 5) with the God-given power to turn away, they choose to go where he desires to send them, as in “I heard the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?’ I said: ‘Here am I! Send me.’” (vs. 8) As a fellow pastor once summed it up, “If we’re supposed to say Yes to God all on our own, we’ve gotta be able to say No.”

At the end of the Book of Joshua, God’s people are pictured as finally settled in the land promised them, only to be presented with a new challenge by their leader. The universal meaning of the challenge resonates deep within the human soul at all times and everywhere:

Now hold the Lord in awe, and serve him in loyalty and truth. Put away the gods your father served beyond the Euphrates and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. But if it does not please you to serve the Lord, choose here and now whom you will serve: the gods whom your forefathers served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living. But I and my family, we shall serve the Lord. (Joshua 24:14-16, REB)

This well known passage from the Old Testament reminds its readers movingly that God does not infuse in most people directly the trust, loyalty, and thoughtful obedience that are the hallmarks of mature faith. Rather, God creates within them the capacity freely to make such virtues their own, and calls upon them to decide and re-decide for themselves whether or not they will be faithful in the way God desires.

There is, of course, a potential stumbling block embedded in the text just quoted. Although Joshua makes a decision of faith all on his own, members of his household do not. Rather, he makes it for them. Such a practice seems to have been widespread in the Middle East at the time of the Hebrews’ Hebrews’Hsettlement of Canaan. It survives in the early Christian practice of baptizing whole households after their leaders became followers of Christ and later on in the forced conversion of families, tribes, and nations by their Christian conquerors. Imposing a particular form of faith on people and never permitting them to decide for themselves what they will believe is a practice that is still deemed acceptable in many societies all over the world. The major problem with the practice is that it demeans the worth and dignity of each individual before God and, in Joshua’s words, the calling of every man and every human to choose “here and now” Whom he or she will serve. Expressed in explicitly Christian terms, the point is that each person must decide for himself and herself (a) whether to listen to the Gospel message at all, (b) whether to listen closely enough to it to gain an understanding of it, (c) whether to believe that its truth has eternal significance, and (d) whether to commit oneself to the cause of the One who is its ultimate source.

A New Testament parallel to the Isaiah and Joshua texts is Luke’s depiction of the Day of Pentecost. It contains an especially illuminating illustration of how faith includes, first, hearing the message and, second, choosing to believe it. Following his description of the descent of the Spirit and summary of a sermon interpreting it, Luke writes: “Those who accepted what (Peter) said were baptized, and some three thousand people were added to the number of believers that day.” (Acts 2:41, REB) What has always stood out vividly in this passage is the large number of newly baptized converts it extols. But it is the text’s very first words that are the especially important ones. Each baptism followed upon someone’s listening to what Peter said and upon choosing to believe that what Peter said is true. The faith that was the response to Peter’s message delivered at Pentecost is like the faith that was and is the response to Jesus’ message delivered throughout his earthly ministry.

One vital part of human beings’ created nature, then, is the capacity to respond to God’s self-revelation with gratitude, obedience, and joy, as well as with indifference, resentment, and defiance. The other is the God-given power to exercise that capacity on the basis of deliberation and choice rather than impulse. With the capacity and with the power comes a truly awesome responsibility, as Christianity understands it, for God calls upon every person to decide how he or she will respond to these great gifts; God does not make the decision for them. Even if one were confronted by God in an experience of overwhelming significance—perhaps of a burning bush, or a still, small voice, or a warmed heart—it would still be up to her, as it was to Moses and Elijah and the Emmaus Road travelers, to decide just who and what it is that she sees and hears and whether to put complete trust in the One suddenly appearing in power and glory.

The decision one must make in order to have faith is twofold. First, it is a decision about whom or what to trust, ultimately, e.g., one’s family, a political system, country, wealth, karma, being thought well of, possessions, voodoo, one’s own insights and abilities—or the great I AM, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, the prophets, and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. Second, the decision of faith is a decision about what beliefs best make clear the nature of that to which people should give their highest allegiance, e.g.:

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth forth his handywork. (Psalm 19:1 KJV)

There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings stretched across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all. (Archibald MacLeish)

When a person realises . . . oneness with Brahman, he is oblivious of the idea that he is an embodied being. (Swami Nikhilananda)

For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. (Psalm 8:5, KJV)

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. (Jean-Paul Sartre)

Deciding in what or in whom to put ultimate trust and deciding what to believe about the ultimate object of that trust can be as unsettling as it is momentous. Respecting the very measure of his own freedom with which he has endowed humanity, God invites but does not coerce people to believe in him. However, God does hold people accountable for whatever decision they do make about his invitation to relationship and call to discipleship. In the time of decision for or against the life of faith, therefore, everything that can ever matter is all of a sudden at stake and on the far side of a decision made, nothing will ever be the same.

Some people calculate their accountability before God in terms of securing an afterlife filled with unimaginable bliss and avoiding one filled with terror, grief, loneliness, and excruciating pain. Others frame the consequences of trusting or not trusting God in terms of ensuring a purpose-filled life here on earth, buoyed by gratitude and joy instead of deadened by the aimlessness and hopelessness to which unbelief inexorably leads. And just as one cannot avoid the decision of faith, one cannot trivialize it. Having faith is not simply one among many possible ways of living, toward the choice of which the Creator remains sublimely neutral. Whether or not people will make their relationship with God the vital center of everything that they feel, think, decide, and do as human beings is, from the standpoint of the Christian faith, the single, overarching question about human existence in the world, to which every other question sooner or later must and does give way.

By way of a concluding illustration of this section and chapter, after Eleanor’s initial outburst following her ex-husband’s wildly acclaimed baptism, she and her caregiver, Polly, talked a lot about what coming to and maturing in faith is. Among other things, she gradually came to see that:

Eleanor: When you really get down to it, Pete wasn’t swept into those waters that afternoon by some Spirit-caused cyclone. And Jesus certainly didn’t throw him in. Pete went in on his own. And it had to be a little scary for him. He could just as well have told Jesus off, like he had been telling everybody else off for years.

Polly: He’s certainly been making a lot of decisions since he came into the church. Who would have thought that he would be teaching Sunday School, and driving the van for seniors, and cooking the Men’s Club breakfasts, and I don’t know what else besides? Pete’s life may never be the same and, to me, that can be a whole lot scary.

Eleanor: And then there’s the tithing. It got to me—thank goodness for no more than a minute, though—when he asked if I’d agree to some reduction in child support so that he could do it. With all the hassling I gave him about coming to church, I guess I deserved this.

Polly: Well, you sure responded well to it. Just one more of those decisions you’ve kept making all your life about being a Christian.

Eleanor: You’re right. I really could have turned him down. But I didn’t. And I really could choose to stay mad about kind of being taken for granted in the church. I won’t though. And it’ll be a good decision on my part.

Polly: Kind of like Pete’s good decision not to turn his back when Jesus showed up in his life.

Eleanor: One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is how many times Jesus has shown up in my own life.

Polly: I’m not sure I know what you mean. It’s been sounding like you think Jesus has pretty much avoided you.

Eleanor: I know. But maybe he’s really been there for me all along. In all those Sunday School teachers, and the preachers, and the music, and the mission trips, and in my kids, and (hesitating) . . . right now, in you.