Angry Conversations with God (9 page)

Jesus: I know why you did it. I know you were looking for love. But I loved you. Wasn’t that enough?

Susan: I needed a human to say he loved me, to say I mattered.

Jesus: I know. I’m sad you didn’t get that from a Christian guy.

Susan: Well, I’m sorry.

Jesus: And you know I forgave you already.

Rudy: (To Jesus) You’re not angry or hurt or heartbroken?

Jesus: Just because I’m not throwing a table over doesn’t mean I’m not upset.

Susan: (To Jesus) If you want to throw a table over to vent, I understand.

Jesus: How about I throw that trophy case out the window to prove I’ve got cojones?

Rudy: No, no. I believe you. Last question. Let’s talk about creativity. No one in Susan’s family “got” her. Doesn’t sound
like the church did either. Why is that, God? Do you not like art?

Susan: Only if it ends in an altar call.

God: Come on. I love art. The Sistine Chapel, the Bach B Minor Mass.
A Man for All Seasons.
Love that stuff.

Susan: You didn’t like my kind of art. Show me one joke in the Bible.

God: The hill of foreskins.

God snickered and Jesus joined him. Well, that’s how I saw it.

Susan: That was
supposed
to be a joke?

God: Come on, Susan, the visual picture alone…

Susan:
Why couldn’t one Christian tell me that when I needed to hear it?
My mom made me feel horrible for laughing at “Hugo Vas Deferens.”

God: No one in the church got the joke. Sad.

Susan: Well, you know who got the joke? You know who got
me
? You know who appreciated me and made me feel like I mattered? Heathens and drunks and potheads and Jews.

God: I sent whomever I could get!

His answer caught me off guard.

Susan: That was you?
You
put those people in my life? Then why were you so upset when I fell in love with David?

God: Don’t boink the messenger.

Jesus: (To God) At least David was a Jew. She could have fallen for a pothead.

Had God used those people to love and encourage me? The ones my church and parents rejected? Well, Jesus did love outcasts
and God did choose the foolish to shame the wise. Maybe I could have figured it out. Still, if just one,
just one
Jesus person had made me feel loved at the time, it could have changed a lot. It could have changed everything.

YES, I HAD CHEATED ON JESUS. IN MY DEFENSE, WE WEREN’T
officially “married” yet—to use the analogy set forth in my story. Ideally you don’t get married until you’re a fully functioning
adult. I wasn’t even old enough to vote. But according to American evangelical
churchianity,
I’d committed a sin worse than murder or genocide or trying to set myself up as a deity. I’d had sex!

Actually, I felt horrible—and it was more than just Lutheran guilt. Sex was awkward. The media presented sex as the ultimate
transcendent experience. Girls were fed the
A Star Is Born
version—Babs and Kris lounging forever in a bathtub with candles and incense; guys were fed the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am
version. And therein lies the first of many diverging expectations.

What did sex set in motion? A wave of insecurity and neediness, that’s what. I worried: Did David love me? Could I make him
love me forever? I didn’t even know who I was yet, and now I wanted some boy to tell me who I was? And love who I was
forever
? Yeesh. Talk about a recipe for codependency. How come they never mentioned
that
in Sex Ed?

Sex aside, I was terrified about college. All my friends got into expensive or out-of-state schools. Julianne was headed to
USC, Doug to Notre Dame. David got into Yale. My dad wouldn’t pay for me to live in a dorm so after I graduated as valedictorian,
I watched my friends fly off to the Ivy League, got into my car, and commuted to UC Irvine.

Eventually David and I broke up. We were two charged particles spinning in different directions. I just wasn’t into sex, and
David wasn’t into Jesus. I cried. We promised to stay friends. “You’re still the coolest girl I know,” David said as he hugged
me good-bye. He was off to New Haven. I was off to nowhere.

That’s what made premarital sex seem wrong. Not because “the Bible told me so” or because of Pastor Norm’s shredded cardboard,
but because it ran my heart through a blender. If I heard God speak at all, it was a new voice inside saying,
“This isn’t what you’re meant for, Susan. This isn’t your life.”

Irvine was one of the first planned communities, and everything was planned around the color beige: beige malls, beige houses
with beige trim, and beige basketball hoops. No, wait. You weren’t allowed to have basketball hoops—they ruined the clean
lines. Irvine was so clean it was sterile. And UC Irvine was a college in quarantine.

UCI was a great school if you were studying premed or engineering. It was also good for theater—that is, if you wanted to
study postmodern deconstructionist bucket-of-blood theater. I did not. In high school, Van Holt loved my facial expressions.
My college professor said I used my face too much. “Stop mugging. What does anger look like in your fingers?” I wanted to
flip him off.

My one bright spot was getting letters from David. He filled them with stories about Ivy League. He couldn’t write a sentence
without a set-up and a punch line. When he finally wrote me about his new girlfriend, he set it up with “I wanted you to know”
and buttoned it off with “She’s not as cool as you.” David wasn’t a jerk; he was just a guy. Of course he’d met someone. He
was a smart, funny, Jewish hottie at Yale. I was a depressed Lutheran WASP commuting to the Beige Circle of Hell.

Meanwhile, my sister was blossoming at her private Christian college. She got good grades; she made friends; she even got
a boyfriend who wasn’t afraid of my dad. She had confidence and peace. When she came home on weekends, the contrast between
our lives was blinding.

“Susie?” I could hear the lecture coming. “How are you and Jesus doing?”

“Why, did he say something about me?”

“I’m just asking. You seem sad. It worries me.”

I hadn’t forgotten Jesus. But I kept him on the periphery of my thoughts. I kept everything on the periphery. I didn’t want
to think; otherwise I got depressed imagining my friends’ new exciting lives compared to my beige, decaying one.

So I put on my Walkman and ran. I listened to Bruce Springsteen’s
Darkness on the Edge of Town
and ran for miles through the winding golf-course streets. I turned the tape over and ran some more. Running kept me out
of the house and away from Dad’s TV. The Walkman pounded out “Badlands” and I pounded the miles and time and thoughts into
the pavement under my feet.

My last exam fell on the evening of December 8, 1980. Psychobiology—questions about the interaction of depression and the
body. I should have presented myself as the answer. As I was driving home, I flipped on the radio and heard John Lennon asking
me to imagine there was no heaven. Why? I was already in hell. I shut the radio off.

When I got home, my father was standing in the living room, face drawn and angry. “So I guess you heard?”

“Heard what?”

“Sit down.”

I knew before the words came out of my father’s mouth. I shrieked, “No, no!” as if that could shove his words back in. But
the words came out:
shot, assassin, news bulletin.
We turned on the news and saw hundreds of people outside John’s apartment in New York. John Lennon was dead.

I ran outside and down the street. I ran past David’s house, past Julianne’s and Doug’s. I ran and ran with the music in my
head.
Badlands. Badlands. Badlands.

I got home after midnight. My father came out and sat next to me. “I always thought their voices sounded beautiful together.
No matter what else people said about them, they sounded good together.” He put his arm around my shoulder and I wept.

My sister came home the next night. We listened to John’s new album and cried together. “Do you think John’s in heaven?” she
asked.

“Nancy, please don’t—”

“My theology professor thinks he could be.”

“How?”

“All time is the present to God. So he can send Jesus to John even now and give him a chance to know the real Jesus. After
all, they loved the same things.”

“Yeah. Justice and peace, and the truth.”

“Do you want to pray?”

I hadn’t prayed much lately. I hadn’t prayed with my sister since we were kids. Now I wanted to. We prayed that in the eternal
now, Jesus would reveal himself to John. Not the wimpy churchy Jesus, but the Jesus who befriended sinners and fought for
justice and peace and truth, like John. The Jesus who gave up his life so John could live forever.

Over the next few months I thought about Jesus more. I had prayed for Jesus to save John, but I was keeping him at arm’s length
myself. Why? Because I wanted to live life my way? Look where that had gotten me. I cared more about what my ex-boyfriend,
friends, and teachers thought of me. Now they were all gone. Who was I, with no one there to remind me? Whose opinion mattered?

I decided maybe I could stomach
The Way.
I pulled it out of my closet and read. And read and read. I knew all these verses, but they seemed more real to me now.

For I know the plans I have for you, says the LORD
.

They are plans for good and not for evil, to give you a

future and a hope. (Jer. 29:11)

For long ago the LORD had said to Israel: I have loved

you, O my people, with an everlasting love; with

loving-kindness I have drawn you to me. (Jer. 31:3)

Never! Can a mother forget her little child and not

have love for her own son? Yet even if that should be,

I will not forget you. See, I have tattooed your name

upon my palm and ever before me is a picture of

Jerusalem’s walls in ruins. (Isa. 49:15-16)

That was just the Old Testament. That was
God the Father
speaking. Jesus had so many things to say about how I could have abundant life, how he laid down his life for his friends.
And he called me his friend. This time I heard the voice again: God’s still, small voice.
“
This
is what I created you for, Susan. This is your life. Life to the fullest.”

My heart broke, knowing how I’d turned him away. But it broke open too from all that love. God had never left me. Jesus was
still knocking on the door.

As a child I loved Jesus the way a girl loves the boy next door. As a teenager, I wandered away. I was an adult now. It was
time to make an adult decision; to say “I do” or stop stringing him along. My life stretched out ahead of me. And there was
Jesus standing at the top of the road, calling me into a big, abundant life. Would I follow, no turning back?

“Yes, Jesus. I do.”

I didn’t wake up from that with a different molecular structure. But the loneliness and despair left. I’d caught glimpses
of God’s presence before: standing in the backyard, looking at the stars, taking Communion. Now I felt it, the way you feel
the difference between the desert and the tropics. The air was thick with God, with hope and with possibility.

I knew I was forgiven. But I wanted more than forgiveness. I wanted to make it up to him. My first prayer as a “married” woman
went something like this:

Dear God, I know I’ve done everything wrong and you hate me. From now on I’m going to do everything right so you’ll love me.
I’m going to read the Bible every day and pray. I’m going to ask for your guidance on everything. I’m never ever going to
have sex again! Well, until I get married to a real guy.

Amazing what getting a new life does to your energy level. I got into action! I went on the Scarsdale diet and lost fifteen
pounds. I looked and felt great, so I kept on going. I got down to ninety-two pounds and lost my menstrual cycle. But anorexia
had its perks. It sure made chastity easy: it’s hard to be horny when you’re not ovulating. But who cared? God had a wonderful
plan for my life, and Jesus was leading the way. “Come on, Susan! Anything can happen! It’s the eighties!”