Instructions from God

God and mom stopped having children after three. Dad said that when he told people to “go forth and multiply” he didn’t mean for them to do so with reckless abandonment. He said that families were like a chain and its value could not be measured by the number of links, but rather by its overall strength. All families must choose how to build their own chain.

In my chain we have two adult links and three children links. Little Mary is the youngest and she has been fashioned from gold. She is quiet, reflective and beautiful. She can be found mainly on her own and brings immediate pleasure to the discoverer. Jesus Merv Christ stands in the middle. He is iron, a universally found and most useful metal. He exists in everything and is vital to all of the living. He can be found in all things from the construction of our buildings to the blood cells that carry oxygen in our bodies. I am the oddest and like my sister was named after my mother and grandmother and her mother and her mother also. I’ll leave it to you to pick my metal.

I asked Dad why he named my brother Jesus Christ and he said without hesitation, “He’s my only son, what else was I supposed to call him.”

The five of us grew up in a pleasantly green neighborhood in the Austin suburbs where all the houses were constructed from bricks and built in a colonial design. There was a park with a playground and pond just two blocks from our home. The neighborhood was infested with children. When I asked God why we lived where we did he said it was because it was comfortable.

You would probably think that God would be a doctor or psychologist or someone influential like the President. But God said that he had been the most powerful deity in the Heavens and now that he was on Earth he wanted to hold the most powerful job possible. God worked as a first grade teacher at Our Lady of Perpetual Pain Elementary School.

"Life is like a journey composed of many individual steps," God said to me. "For some reason people tend to focus on the final steps as the most important. They see each step along the way as a pawn to the destination or final step. This could not be farther from the truth. The way I see it, Jellybean, each step is equally important and has its own special value. Not one step carries any more significance then another. If you take your first steps carefully, the last will be easy. I help people with those first steps. Parents help their children with their first steps and that is why I created parents and first grade teachers."

God was pleasant, compassionate and managed to soften his voice for the kids who arrived to their first day of school, often full of fear. Most of the kids liked him immediately. The role fit my father well. He loved kids and respected the creativity stowed away in their innocent minds. He always gave them advice, but never directions. Even at a young age a person must make a choice; it is the nature of freedom.

God said that he wanted people to choose to do the right thing. It meant nothing knowing that someone did what was right out of fear of the repercussions. When someone follows your word because the passion within their heart tells them that it is the right thing to do, then you no longer have a disciple but a companion.

In class God demanded complete silence when he spoke as if his words were the word of...well I bet you know what I was going to say. One thing those Biblical writers got right was the manner in which he spoke. God was always speaking in parables or metaphors and he made the most difficult decisions seem so simple. But the thing about God was that he never came out and showed you exactly what you were looking for, you always had to figure it out for yourself.

I could be fighting with my little brother over a toy shark or something just as insignificant and God would enter the room, ask for the toy and then sit down in the room. Jesus and I would stare at each other knowing that there would be a lot of silence before he spoke. During the silence, Jesus and I would just be sitting there looking at the toy, salivating. And then God would tell us some story about a farmer with two crops, one of giant corn and another of peas. Or he’d talk about a rich man who’d hoard his gold coins but then die for lack of bread and it made absolutely no sense to us but you’d tell him you understood just so you could get the toy back. He would finally hand us our toy and, once he was gone, continue the fight over the toy. But maybe just a little less strongly.

God cared about me and Jesus and little Mary. He said he would always keep us safe as long as we believed in him. And we did.

When I was in the first grade, there was this kid who was bigger than the rest of us because he was held back. He seemed to have a lot of issues with being held back. His name was Tommy and he had to go to the Principal’s Office twice a day to take some medicine that was supposed to make him nice but it really didn’t work.

Tommy was always calling me names. He screamed scary Mary, for instance. It made no sense. How was I scary? Just because it rhymed with my name? He would chant it over and over for no reason what so ever.

There was this day during recess when we were playing tag. I was running really hard because when I played a game I always wanted to win. After the game I walked over to the drinking fountain and as I felt chunks of cold water flow through my lips it started. “Scary Mary, scary Mary, bet your back is really hairy.”

I ignored him and tried to drink. Tried to enjoy the rush of the water as it raced down my eager throat. My heart continued to race, both from the running and partly because the chanting was becoming really annoying. His song continued, “Scary Mary, scary Mary, bet your back is really hairy.”

I looked up and discovered that Tommy wasn’t even in line for a drink.

I don’t know why I did it. I just snapped. I stopped drinking and looked at him or more specifically his mouth: the large, bloated, black disgusting gap in the center of his face. It kept moving and screaming. And after a few seconds I couldn’t even hear the words anymore. All of my senses tuned in to the motion. His lips kept sputtering along, spit occasionally spraying out and finally I just pulled my hand back and hit it. And then rather than words, blood was streaming from this trench. Tommy started crying I think. I couldn’t tell for sure because I still couldn’t hear. His wail just blended in with all the other sounds in the yard.

I froze. I watched crimson droplets spray from his fat lips. Jamie told me I should run but I was six years old, where was I going to run to? Next I found myself under the wing of the recess monitor being led to the Principal’s office. The recess monitor was a short, cube shaped old lady with wavy gray hair on her head.

I sat in the Principal’s office waiting. There were two chairs, both orange and plastic, and a long wooden bench. I sat on the bench with my feet swinging freely above the ground. I was nervous because I knew that the secretary had called my father. I had never seen him angry, six years and he never had raised his voice. Then I had never done anything like this.

Tommy came out of the nurse’s office and sat down on the bench next to me. He held a handkerchief to his lips and occasionally let out a whimper. His lip had already become purple and swollen.

I am not sure if time stood still or just slowed to a crawl, but I could swear that the big hand on the clock, the one that marches out the seconds of our life, started moving slower and slower and eventually just gave up and stopped. I waited for what seemed the time the Israelites wandered in the desert. One thing the T’s taught me, God was good at making people wait.

Mt father finally came into the office.

Dad didn’t appear angry. Rather he had an odd look on his face; one dripping sadness into disappointment like paints on an artist’s palette. His eyes focused on the floor, he walked straight pass me and into the Principal’s room without saying a word. It was as if he was suffering because of my sin.

I decided to look down at the floor also. I had not really noticed it before. It was just checkerboard linoleum, nothing worth registering.

I sat there while my father spoke with the principal thinking about what he would say when he came out. And I knew he was going to come out and tell me about a fish who swam his entire life in the ocean searching for sunken treasure only to realize after finding the treasure that he had no pockets with which to carry it. And what kind of a story is that to tell a kid.

After what seemed an eternity, he came out of the office and walked over to me. I could see his eyes and he looked sadder then I had ever seen him. I had caused that. That look on his face. Suddenly, I didn’t want him to speak. I couldn’t bear to hear his voice. I knew I couldn’t stop it from coming. We all have to face our maker at some point and my day was here. God stood near me and said, “Mary?”

“Yes Dad,” I moaned.

He took up a seat next to me on one of the plastic chairs. It looked absurd because the chair was for kids and God kind of spilled out over both sides. God looked at Tommy, took in his swollen lip and shook his head. “Mary, I know you are a good person with a kind spirit.” I looked over at the clock and noticed that the second hand had started moving again. My Dad continued speaking. “When we hit somebody, we harm ourselves more than we hurt the person that we hit." Tommy shook his head as if he did not believe that. "I know you can see the blood on Tommy’s lips and it is obvious that you have hurt him physically. But what you can’t see is the entire person, the spiritual soul combining with the physical. When you consider the entire human being, the pain that you have created is far greater within yourself. See Mary, not only did you injure Tommy’s lip but you have also damaged your spirit.”

God brushed my hair and looked into my eyes, “I know you have a strong spirit and it will heal just like Tommy’s mouth will. But try to remember, Mary, the very best thing that you can be in this world is kind. It is most difficult to be kind when others are not. We may not always reach this goal but we should always strive for it.” God looked over at Tommy’s swollen lip and back at me. “I love you very much, Jellybean.”

God told Tommy that he was sorry that his daughter had punched him and that Tommy had also been forgiven. God said that he understood that Tommy harassed out of feelings of alienation and isolation. He finally told him to try being kind to others and then he would make friends. Tommy just moaned and turned away to face the door.

That was it. God kissed my forehead and walked out the door, back to the first grade where he would teach the letters of the alphabet to word starved children. I sat there on that hard bench in silence for another fifteen minutes until the principal asked me why I had not gone back to class yet and I had to shrug my shoulders because I didn’t know. He sent me back to my class and as I walked down the long hall to the third grade I thought about what my father had said. I did not fully understand his words. I know that after hitting that boy I felt bad inside and I think that might have been what God meant by harming my spirit. But what bothered me most was seeing how sad my hitting that boy had made God feel and I knew that I never wanted to do that again.