Snippet (SP)

To get this blog kicked off - a snippet from a story I was writing (for NaNoWriMo) a few years ago. It's from the middle-ish of my story. 

-SP

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Sometimes being “just worried” can cloud your whole day, put a dark grey shadow on everything. It reminds me of a class I took in eleventh grade, which I guess was just last year but feels so much longer ago.

It was a watercolor class - and you have to understand, I’m not much of an artist, but somehow color really affects me. I love color and not in the way that a designer would and paint everything super bright but more just how you can put a drop of black in baby blue and instantly everything turns shady, or how a drop of red turns everything warmer somehow. Anyway one day we were all supposed to be painting a beautiful scene of a bright summer day in Holland or somewhere all European. So I started off all right and thought I was doing great, when I made the mistake of looking at the easel next to me where Michael, our resident artist was painting yet another masterpiece.

And when I looked back at mine I was sorely disappointed. The sun looked like a neon tennis ball and even I couldn’t tell that my windmill was in fact a windmill.  So rather than just showing my teacher and letting everyone know once and for all how terrible an artist I am I make a fast and furious decision. I grabbed a wet brush and soaked it in grey and without hesitating spread it across the page. All of a sudden my warm summer day in Holland had turned stormy and dark. Right then my teacher came up to me and, looking over my shoulder, gasped with what I thought at first was horror but then when she called the class around to see I realized she was actually pleased with my mistake.

“The sign of a true artist,” she said that day, “is unimpeded creativity. Do what you want, not what you think you should do, not what you think other people want you to do. You don’t have to be original. You have to be you, and most importantly the creative side of you.” Apparently I was the true artist of the day. 

Anyway God must be a true artist too, he must, because He can cause a whole day or a whole week or even sometimes a whole month to get cloudy and dark just like that. I wonder if my art teacher would say that God is a true artist. 

Again, anyway I’m worried. And as I think about it, I’ve been worried for a long time, and I’m not sure about what. Now it’s worrying me that I’m worried.

Aren’t worries just like that? They come in bunches, sort of, like one worry multiplies into two then four then eight until finally it all blows up then goes back to normal. Doesn’t it seem like everything gets worse before it can get better? 

I roll back onto my side, letting my pillow flop out flat again. Outside I can still see the moon glowing but it seems to have moved slightly to the side. Or wait, maybe I’m the one who has moved. I always forget these things - obviously I wasn’t the best at Physical Science. Do we move, or does the moon move? I ponder this question. Does it matter which one is the one that moves? I don’t really think it does because I can’t tell one way or the other anyway. 

Another worry hits me now. Am I weird? Strange? Quirky? Is that okay? Does it matter? And that worries me too. Lately I’ve been asking ‘does it matter’ about lots and lots of things: school, God, life. I punch my pillow down in a sudden burst of sleepless frustration.

One time I went up to our pastor after church service and timidly asked him if I could meet him sometime about religious questions. He looked surprised but said sure, how about tomorrow? All that night I scribbled down questions and then crossed them out, again and again, trying to get at just what it was that I had a problem with about God. The next afternoon when I walked into his office and sat down I had boiled all my feelings into one question: How do you know that God loves you?

Not very original, I know, but really. I believe in God, because I can’t even fathom existence without Him, but come on. How do we really know for certain that He is a being who actually loves? And loves me in particular? Really pastor?

I didn’t say that - that would be rude, but I wanted to. When I finally asked him my question his eyebrows shot up halfway up his forehead like he had never even thought of that, and that was how I knew my mission was going to be fruitless. He first said something about how I should have the faith of a child because I still was a child, and I shouldn’t be messing with big adult questions and about how only God knows the answers to some things and humans weren’t meant to know. And finally he ended with “God loves you because you are a good girl. Aren’t you?” I left right then.

I haven’t gone back to church for a while now. After he said all those things and made me feel like a silly little girl, which maybe I am but I really am trying not to be, I just didn’t feel called, as he would put it, to go back to Southview Bible Church, where Gram had been the pianist and Great-Grandfather had been a deacon, long long ago.