Crackers From Heaven

God is love.
She had heard it a million times and seen it in a million different places. It had become cliché; meaningless. One of those phrases like “hang in there” or “it will be ok” that people spout off when they don’t know what else to say. No one ever tells you how to hang in there and the truth is sometimes, it’s not going to be ok. So it was with this phrase, “God is love.”

She had gone to church all her life, with mostly disappointing results. People were horrible everywhere, but the worst of any could be found in the front pew every Sunday morning. Still, she went because she knew truth could be found there, even if she had to cut away all the double talk and spin to get to it. She also went to look for loopholes. She knew a lot of the party line just couldn’t be what a loving Father would want for his children. She went to be convinced. She went to be persuaded. But it was getting redundant. She had felt God, felt love, once in her life and it wasn’t in a church.

So she spent a lot of time talking to people outside the church; people who didn’t mind telling her they had no use for religion. She secretly had no use for it either and hated that so many used it as an exclusive club within which they could exercise their most unholy and selfish intentions. She was looking for spirituality and she saw it in people who were slow to anger. She was looking for faith and she saw it in parents who expected their children’s lives to be better than their own. She was looking for peace and she saw it in those who floated gently through life, paying little attention to trivial things like “right and “wrong.”Still she knew she couldn’t be like them. She had to be obedient. Discerning. Faithful. She was supposed to be setting an example. Funny, she now considered herself among the lost and searching.

As was so often the case these days, she found herself in a room with a self-proclaimed non-believer. She was holding his son on her lap and talking at breakneck speed, trying to convince him or convince herself, she wasn’t sure. She did not yet have children and found herself at an age where she was relentlessly aware of her approaching deadline. He was her age and one of the souls she had been trained to feel sorry for. But she was envying him.

He was in the middle of proving evolution when he abruptly stopped talking. She followed his gaze. He was mesmerized by the face of his son. She looked down at him and watched him silently eating a cracker. It was too big for his perfect little mouth and inevitably some partially-chewed cracker fell from a corner and onto her knee. Neither father nor son apologized. Eventually, he looked back at her and said, “Sometimes it’s so awesome just to watch him eat a cracker, ya know?”
And suddenly she did.
She knew what years of carefully-worded sermons and slow piano refrains couldn’t teach her; what countless relationships would never show her. This was what love looked like. This was the face of her long-lost friend. This was the truth she had been searching for.
And just like that, God was in the room.