New Heart Church by Jim Barringer
Chapter One
Many people who hear my story mistakenly think that night is the climax and everything else is kind of an extended wrapping up of loose ends. Nothing could be further from the truth. I was still a wreck, I still didn’t know who I was, my parents still didn’t like me, and I still had no job. If that prayer was supposed to be a climax, it was a pretty terrible one.
That’s what I woke up thinking, in fact, right before I noticed that my nose was freezing. I was used to a little bit of cold creeping in through the window, but this was full-on frigid, as if the heat in the building wasn’t on at all. I glanced over at my clock to see how late I had slept, but the clock’s face was blank. The power was out.
I pulled the sleeping bag up as far as it would come, but now that I had noticed the cold, I couldn’t un-notice it, and it started creeping inside the bag with me. I wriggled out of it, then unzipped it and wrapped it around myself like a giant shroud. Changing clothes, I stepped out of my door, looking to see if Stanley was home. He wasn’t, but as I stood staring at his door, I heard a voice from down the hall. “Hey, Eli!”
It was Elizabeth, bundled up like she was about to go skiing, and waving me toward her. “Want to come upstairs and hang with us? We’re having a no-power party.”
“I should shower first,” I said, running my fingers through my bed-head.
“No power means no warm water,” she reminded me.
“Never mind.” I’d just have to deal with the muffled laughter. My bed hair could be pretty extreme.
“No one else has showered either,” Elizabeth said over her shoulder as we started climbing the stairs. “I kind of like it this way.”
“What, smelly?”
“No,” she chuckled. “Unpretentious. When you shower, you do your hair, you’re putting on a front. People see you the way you want them to see you. I think there’s something really neat about all of us just being how we are, you know, not dressed up, no makeup, no nothing. Just us, honest us.”
“I don’t know about all that.”
“Maybe you will one day.”
Suddenly I realized: she didn’t know about my encounter with God. Abbie was the only one who had any idea, and Abbie probably wasn’t here. I was the only one in the building who knew. I felt like I should probably tell them, but I didn’t know what to say. It would be weird to just blurt something like that out in front of everybody.
We walked through the open door of Danny and Elizabeth’s apartment. The couches in the center of the floor had been pushed to the walls, and in the center were Stanley, Danny, and Jake, huddled around a deck of playing cards.
“Morning, Eli,” Danny said.
“I prayed last night,” I blurted.
“Did you?” he asked, surprised but interested.
“Yeah. Abbie and I went out after the game and she talked to me about how I need God, and so I prayed.” It sounded silly when I said it that way, but I had said it. Even as the words were leaving my mouth, I felt very strange, as if something inside me was already different; I wasn’t prone to just opening up and sharing things like that with people, but here I had done it, barely thinking twice.
There was a sort of stunned silence, and then Stanley stood up. “You’re for real?”
“I’m serious.”
Before I could blink, Stanley had wrapped me up in a bear hug, actually lifting me off my feet and swinging me around, laughing like a child on Christmas day. The others, as well, were grinning ear to ear, delighted. I couldn’t figure out what the big deal was. I had only done what I needed to do.
“You know how to play spades?” Danny asked me, shuffling the cards that had been on the floor when I walked in.
“Never heard of it.”
“I’ll show you.” He started dealing out the cards, patiently explaining the ideas of following suit, breaking trumps, and winning tricks. It looked fascinating, and I watched as the first game played out.
What I noticed, as I watched them, is that the feeling I’d had the night before – was it really only the night before? It seemed like a different lifetime – that feeling of lacking the thing they had in common was completely gone. I felt like I belonged with them now. It seemed inconceivable to me that a little prayer, a decision, could spark that feeling in me. I felt a creeping unease, a feeling that I was in over my head and didn’t understand very much about what I had just gotten myself into.
But as we all sat on the floor, blankets and sleeping bags wrapped around us like we were children again, there was no denying what I felt, unless my feelings were going haywire on me. That thought stuck in my head, and it became a source of discomfort to me, because it brought to mind just how much of this was about feelings and emotions. Those were not things that I typically did well with. But, when I looked back on it, everything that had brought me to this point was based on feelings: my desire to belong, my frustration at not finding a job, my need to feel loved. Was it possible that those were the things about life that were true and reliable, and that all the other things, the things I’d built my life around before now, were the distractions?
I really needed to talk with someone who could tell me what to think, because my world had been turned upside-down, and I didn’t know what any of it meant.
But soon those thoughts took a backseat as Elizabeth handed her pile of cards to me and left the apartment to run to the grocery store for some ice, in case the things in the refrigerator started to go bad. “So wait a minute, why don’t we just go to a place where there’s power?” I asked.
“And skip out on the chance to spend time together in community?” Danny asked.
“Oh. I didn’t think of it that way.”
“Don’t take this wrong, Eli, because I don’t mean it as an insult,” he said, laying his cards down and looking at me. “But you’re going to find a lot of things changing for you, especially the way you think and the priorities you have. Friendships, relationships, those are of paramount importance. You can never, ever pass up a chance to spend time with people or tell them how much they mean to you.”
“I see.”
“So we might be cold together, but we’re together, and that’s more important than not being cold.”
“Yeah, but couldn’t we be warm together?”
Here Jake interjected. “I think there’s a lot to be said for getting away from the ‘comforts’ of modern life, you know? If the power was on, we’d probably be watching the TV, paying attention to that and not to each other. If we went to a restaurant, we’d be about the food. The mall, we’d be about the stores. So I kind of welcome whatever lets us forget about the outside world for a while.”
“So you think this is a good thing?”
“Everything in life can be a good thing, if you want it to be,” Danny told me.
I was going to protest, but suddenly thought about his story of being homeless for so long, and didn’t say anything. If he wanted to say something like that, well, he had earned the right.
At that moment, the confident thrumming of the furnace sounded from the closet and fluorescent lights blinked to life overhead. I chuckled. “Looks like we can be warm together after all.”
But we kept playing cards, deliberately ignoring the electronic gadgetry that was suddenly available to us. Momentarily, Elizabeth returned, toting ice that was no longer needed.
“Well, now,” Danny announced, standing up. “We have a bunch of ice and no need for it. We have a bunch of meat in the fridge that has been warm for several hours and should be used very soon. What does this say to you?”
“It says to me,” Stanley said, “that you’re making us all lunch.”
“I like the way you think,” Danny agreed, pointing at Stanley.
Ironically, within half an hour of the power coming back on, we were once again out in the cool, standing in the garage that Stanley rented, where he kept his grill and a fe
We ate well, laughing and enjoying each other’s company in the bed of a pickup truck. I didn’t want the day, or even the moment, to end. It had been a long time since I’d had that thought about any day or any moment. If this was really what faith was all about for me, then I knew I couldn’t get enough of it.