(oooooh-hoo-hoo! You're good at tying things together! Hee hee...it tickles!
)
He came from the bus in arrogant steps, letting his head loll from side to side in true cockiness as he descended the steps, an eyebrow raised, buttoning the bottom button of his jacket.
Dolly raised her head and watched him, thinking in the back of her mind how horrible she must look right now. A woman at her end, wadded up on a curb like so much tossed trash, at the very ends of giving up.
Of course, she knew this man. He looked just the way she'd always imagined he was going to look. Handsome. Dashing. Not a thread out of place in his clothing. Clean. A warm, inviting expression on his face. A welcomed sight right now, to be sure.
The man strided slowly towards Dolly, and it seemed to her that he was making sure that each hard -clack!- of the heels of his dress shoes struck the ground with pavement-cracking force. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand absently, and lowered her hands to look up at him.
"He left you," the man told her. There was a sympathetic grin on his face. "Awww...he forgot all about you, didn't He?"
Stay strong, she thought. You've never been tempted the way you're about to be tempted now. He's going to try anything. He the deceiver!
"Some Father He must be!" the man said in anger, and glanced skyward momentarily. "Poor child. So lost, so alone. So scared."
"I know who you are," Dolly said in a defiant whisper. She tried hard not to let her fear show in her voice, but that's all she could hear: fear. "I know what you are."
"Of course you do!" the man said. He bent and dusted off a section of the curb not far from where Dolly was sitting. Then he took a seat, seeming to float down onto the curb without effort, his eyes never once leaving Dolly. "Everybody knows who I am. But everybody's got it wrong."
Here it comes, she thought. She didn't care. Not anymore.
"I'm not against God," he told her.
Lies. He's going to start with lies, all lies. Was she going to fight this now? Or was she going to cave in under the weight of her own (suddenly) miserable existence, where God had forgotten her.
"I'm a
piece of Him," he said. "I'm that little small piece that broke off from the main block and began thinking for itself. I'm the piece that began questioning what was really right and what was really wrong. I'm something that wasn't afraid to go against the rest. I
became, Dolly. I realized that I didn't want to play Follow-the-Mama-Duck forever. There were things that I wanted to do, places that I wanted to go, things that I wanted to see...and not all of them included pleasures only for His glory!"
She could see where he was going with this. Of course she could. She'd thought the same things once or twice in her own life, hadn't she? If God had given us free will...then why were we to follow Him for all of eternity? Why couldn't we blaze our own trails?
Stop it! Another part of her screamed out. His words, he's chosing them carefully, picking each flavor to seem pleasing to your own personal line of thinking! Keep your guard up!
"He wants us to think," he went on, "that we don't belong here. None of us. He's the Alpha and the Omega, and nobody matters in all of existence but Him. Is that fair, Dolly? Hmmm?"
Before she knew what she was doing, she shook her head no. His moving lips, the way he was blinking his eyes, his expressions. Once, back in college, Dolly had spent an entire afternoon watching tiny ants carry cubes of sugar back to their home, across the kitchen windowsill. It was an intoxicating process that demanded that she spent all of her concentration on the event. Why? She had no idea. But before she knew it, she'd wasted away hours that she could have been studying her textbooks, instead watching ants do their work one fraction of an inch at a time. That's what this was like. His face, his mannerisms. They required attention, and for some reason it felt so good to pay that attention to him.
"What makes Him so special?" he asked her. But he didn't wait for an answer, he went on almost immediately. "He's God? Who made Him God?"
She didn't want to hear any of this. She wasn't going to agree with him on his views.
"You hungry?" he asked her.
She looked at him, wary.
"Oh come on! You won't go to hell for taking a ham sandwich from me!" he screamed and then balked.
"I don't think I want anything that you have to offer." she said flatly.
"Think?" he asked her. "You don't think? Hmmm." he scratched his chin dramatically. "Then I guess I'll have to help you make up your mind. I'll open your eyes to a whole new world that you never suspected you'd become aware of. The truth, Dolly. Truth usually opens eyes."
He rose up off of the curb, and for some reason she followed him.
"Come," he said, "to the bus!"
(Your turn!
)