Chapter 2: the church in the next town over

 

Returning to real life after each escape to the city became more and more of an adjustment as time went on. Church life was particularly painful.

                Around the time of Thomas’ death, the belief system had gone from a slow unraveling to a complete disintegration. She had done absolutely everything right, and yet, somehow, inexplicably, God had not spared her from this fate. She had been finally free – and had finally had hope for a new future – but God had other plans.

                So did Peter and Mark.

                She was stuck with them and that meant she was stuck with church, too. There was no escape. Except a few nights a week when she got to live a different life, where no one knew her or her family. But she always had to come back. There was no choice where that was concerned. If she tried to leave, they would pull her back. She knew this. And she knew it would be a lot worse for her if that happened – because she had tried it before.

                It hadn’t gone well.

                So she waited until the day when they would decide that she could leave.

                It was just another regular day at church. But each regular day began to feel more and more alien the more time she spent outside of her bubble.

                They didn’t take the new pickup truck to church. It wasn’t ready yet. She rode in the passenger seat while Mark drove and Peter sat in back. She stared out the window for the 13-mile drive, not engaging with her brothers.

                When they arrived, Mark and Peter took off for their respective responsibilities – Mark in the sound booth, Peter in the church office. As soon as they were gone, a few middle-aged men descended on her as she approached the sanctuary.

                “Jordan,” one of them said. “The Lord has put it on my heart to pray for you. That your husband will find you soon.”

                She wondered to herself, if God were in control of when her husband would find her, why did Bill need to pray for it? What did that accomplish? Didn’t it suggest God, himself, did not have all the power? If God’s plan was so easily impacted by humans making fickle requests, God was clearly not all that powerful.

                “My husband did find me,” she reminded him. Six years had passed, and it was as if Thomas had never existed. He had been part of this community. His parents and sister still attended. She had married him in this very sanctuary.

                “God still has a plan for you,” John, another one of the men, reminded her.

                If God did have a plan, that meant that God had planned for Thomas to die young, and for her to become a widow. God planned for Thomas’ parents to bury him. God planned for their suffering.

                “Don’t forget about Ruth,” the third man, Lars, told her, patting her on the arm as she smiled through gritted teeth.

                Ah, yes, Ruth. The only story anyone could ever provide for her to try and make her feel better, which started when her husband was barely in the ground.

Don’t forget Ruth. You can lose your husband and still have a meaningful life as long as you have a kid.

Ruth: proof that it’s OK to hook up with someone you just met, as long as you do eventually marry him.

Ruth: showing that God’s plan for Jesus’ lineage hinged on the suffering caused by death and grief, without which Ruth would never have been forced to seduce Boaz. And if she hadn’t hooked up with him and gotten him to marry her, Jesus wouldn’t have been born, generations later.

                “How could I forget about Ruth?” she couldn’t resist replying out loud.

                “How old are you?” Bill asked.

                “Twenty-eight,” she replied, wishing this could be over.

                The men exchanged looks. “Well, better hope he finds you soon,” John said.

                “He will,” Lars said, patting her arm again. “Elizabeth and Sarah had their children when they were much older than you!”

                The men laughed.

                She didn’t join them.

                As they prayed over her, she wondered idly why no one prayed over her brothers to find their wives. Mark’s betrothed was in Africa on a mission trip for almost another year, but Peter – now thirty – wasn’t even involved with anyone. No one seemed to seek Peter out to tell him it’d all be OK once he got married and started making babies.

                “Someone needs to talk to those brothers of yours,” John said after they prayed, as if reading her mind. But she knew exactly where he was going. “They need to make some plans for you.”

                Yes, her brothers were responsible for finding her a husband. Neither of them had any interest in doing so. It had not gone well the first two times, when their father had chosen for her.

                If only these men knew that her needs for connection were being satisfied a few nights a week, with someone she had no intention of marrying.

                She picked apart the words in the mindless emotional songs that the congregation sang together. She went through the motions of making it seem like she belonged there. She eased the boredom by trying to find a different harmony on each repetitive refrain. She could only do that so many times, when the chorus was 3 notes over a single chord.

                During the scripture reading and the message, she dutifully took notes to look the part. She did jot down a few key phrases to remember for later so that afterward she could continue the charade by discussing the main points of the speech. She had a separate entry in her notebook where she tracked how often the preacher said something that was false, or editorialized in his reading of the Bible without telling them he was doing it. She and her brothers had had to memorize huge passages of the Bible as children. What they didn’t memorize, they knew pretty well. She could always tell when a preacher was adding his own flavor.

                When she saw both Mark and Peter glide to the front of the room for the altar call, she felt the return of the sinking feeling that had come up when she’d seen the pickup in the barn the night before. They were going forward because they had done something. They were repenting, getting their slates wiped clean so they could get back to business. She didn’t like it. She didn’t want to know, this time… but she had a feeling she was going to know, soon.

                She always learned more than she wanted to. She was in it with them, whether she wanted to be or not.

                As the worship team began playing “Create in Me A Clean Heart” over the swooning penitent sinners at the front of the room, her sense of unease gave way to a mischievous feeling. She was pulling one over on everyone. No one here knew about her other life. She had something that was all her own.

                It gave her comfort, knowing this. The church community already knew almost everything else there was to know about her. This small group of people with megachurch vibes in a tiny country church even knew what she and her brothers had been forbidden to tell anyone in the outside world. But now she had her own life, for the first time.

                Maybe she could escape.

                She pushed the thought away, preferring not to give in to hope. If she were to escape, it would be because something outside her control had happened.

                What she didn’t know was that, 13 miles away, something outside her control was happening. Someone had followed a GPS signal to find a body in a field three quarters of a mile from her home.