V...

Later on a Tuesday night all misty and cool we drove to Bible study and she sat beside me in the passenger seat, her feet up on the dash, toes pressed to the glass. Writing in a book and slouched in the seat, she would smile occasionally and I would glance at her from the corner of my eye or watch her reflected in the windshield like the specter I was afraid she was already becoming.

We stopped at the house and walked through the front door. She was greeted and touched by smiling sad faces and led to the living room. I felt her awkwardness, knowing she didn’t like being the center of anything, especially attention. We sat beside eachother, me in my best shirt and she gave me the lightest touch on the knee.

The room was dark and filled with more people than was usual on these nights. All here to pray for her as if we could raise our voices in unison so that God might hear our mutterings and cries more clearly. As if he had the weak hearing of the old man we all pictured him being in our youthful ignorance.

There was a reading from the Psalms. Then a song of petition and we led her to the floor where we gathered and our pastor washed her feet and she hid her face, so shy and serene. Then we laid our hands on her as she lay amidst us supplicatory and we prayed. Some aloud, most, like me, silently. I whispered to myself and stared at her feet all washed and white and hiding the decay beneath and I thought that when Christ called them white washed sepulchers, he really meant us all. That we all decay from the inside with the most lovely and loved of us doing so at a swifter pace. How I wished my own would quicken as well.

After, I drove her home to her father and she slept while I drove and blinked until the road blurred before us. Only the days ahead would show to me more clearly then ever that God is indeed hard of hearing.