I remember the scaffold and the unfinished wood that formed its structure. Jesus stood there weeping, bloodied on nearly every inch of skin and on his once white robe. He looked upward, to heaven or to the happy spring sun I had dreamt above him. I wonder what my mom was thinking that night I came shuffling into her bedroom with my Binky in hand to tell her that Jesus was dying, again, but when I was three and in my nightmare.
“It’s okay, Lauren,” my mother consoled. “Jesus is already dead.”
--
Mom didn’t go to church with us. Every Sunday Daddy took my older sister Samantha and me to Emmanuel Lutheran, while she stayed home. I learned very young that my mom was different from my dad, sister, and me; she was Jewish.
When we got home from church one Sunday in the early afternoon, I ran up to the couch where Mom was lying down, reading. I jumped up onto her and showed her the picture I had drawn. I exclaimed, “In Sunday school I learned that God died on the cross and Jesus raised him from the dead!”
“I think you have those two mixed up,” she taught me.
--
I held a rock in my hand. It was the size of my palm—heavy, grey, round, smooth but unpolished. “Put your favorite name of God on the rock. Or put a Bible verse.” The children’s church pastor started passing markers around to the few dozen other kids holding rocks like mine.
I was in fourth or fifth grade, getting a little too old for children’s church. Most kids were seven or eight, like my stepbrother Ryan who sat next to me. When Ryan got a marker, he wrote a Bible verse, probably an abridged version like the ones we were taught at Northeast Christian Church, about building your house on the rocks or about God as the Rock of Salvation.
Then I got the marker. I stared at my rock for a bit. I liked the way it looked untouched. Part of me wanted to leave it that way. I thought about what to write. A Bible verse? I didn’t know any. Jesus? I didn’t like the name because it seemed too limiting. I decided on the most generic word I could think of: God.
God was a safe word. Everyone believes in God, I figured. Movie stars hold their Oscars and thank God for winning. My mom, she believes in God. All Jews believe in God. Even as a ten-year-old with a rock, I was careful not to offend her with the one name that separated our two faiths: Jesus.
--
“We would like to invite the Sawyer family to the front,” said Pastor Fred to the congregation.
Samantha and I were caught off guard. I threw her a look only best friends and sisters can flawlessly decipher: What’s going on? Her brow furrowed; she crossed her arms. Reluctantly, we followed Dad, our stepmom Kelli, and Ryan to stage.
“The Sawyer family decided to become members of church today. Let’s pray for them.” And they did. By this point, I think Sam started crying. We went back to our seats. The ushers began passing out Communion, but my sister and I didn’t take it because Samantha left the sanctuary crying. I followed her.
“They say Mom’s going to hell,” she told me outside.
I remembered learning something like that in Sunday school, about how only Christians make it to heaven. But unlike my middle school-aged sister, I didn’t take the time to know what that meant exactly. It meant Mom—my beautiful, brown-haired, tennis-playing, hugger, cuddler, dinner-fixing, ouch-kissing mother—was going to hell.
“I want to go back to Emmanuel,” Samantha said.
We’d been going to the nondenominational church, Northeast Christian, for a few years now. Kelli didn’t like Dad’s Lutheran church, so we had stopped going. The nice part about the Lutheran church, at least to Sam, was its unaggressive nature. The new church preached the Great Commission and holiness every week; our Lutheran church preached grace and loving others.
Sam later told our mom what our church said about her, that she was going to hell.
Mom said that was the hardest part about raising two Christian girls—feeling like an outcast in her own family.
Mom’s parents never went to temple with her. Her mother, Della, wanted to raise her kids Jewish just as my father had wanted to raise my sister and me Christian. But Della had sent her children to temple and Jewish Sunday school without joining them.
Mom’s brother died when she was ten. He had become an atheist before he died, so Mom decided to become one as well, to honor her brother somehow. She gave up on that soon after and went back to Sunday school. There was something about the Jewish faith that was so beautiful, she said. Mom kept going until she was fourteen or fifteen, but it was hard being Jewish without her mother’s direct support. Jews were made fun of at her school. She didn’t enjoy going to temple alone. Mom told me she felt different from everyone else.
When Sam came home that one Sunday to tell her what our church had said about Jews, Mom felt like an outcast all over again. Even her children didn’t accept her faith.
--
I was going to be a minister . . . or a youth pastor, or a missionary. I don’t remember when I told my mom this or why—I changed my mind too many times for anyone to keep up—but Mom knew. She held it against me once.
I hated the morning. Mom and Samantha used to joke that no one should talk to me until I drank my apple juice, by then my grumpiness would have worn off. That was the rule. In middle school I was eating breakfast one morning when I snapped at my mom for something she said. I doubt she said anything rude at all, but it was morning and I hadn’t had my apple juice.
She responded, “You’re not nice enough to be a minister.”
Mom said the words with so much conviction; I never forgot them.
--
Tom liked fire. During his first summer as our youth pastor, he had all of us junior high and the senior high students over to his house to build a big bonfire. Tom and his wife Sarah lived in a tiny one-bedroom house, which was meant to be a barn. Behind the house was a big backyard with a swing set and a pile of dry branches ready to heat up.
I was swinging with my best friend Ashley when my mom called. I don’t remember how she reached me since I didn’t have a cell phone yet; I may have given her Sarah’s number. Mom told me she was coming to pick me up, immediately.
“But Mom, can’t you pick me up later?”
“It’s getting late, Laur-en.”
It was nearly eight—too close to her bedtime to come all the way to Tom’s and back. Ever since I started going to youth group a few months earlier, Mom complained about picking me up. Youth group was supposed to let out 7:30, but we were always late. Making plans afterwards—like going to Tom’s—were hard because we lived so far from the church and his house.
One time Mom told me to find something else to do closer to home.
--
“You can’t have that as your email address.”
Mom and I were sitting on my bed; I held a pillow over my chest, trying not to cry. Twenty minutes ago I sent an email out to all my hotmail contacts, telling them of my new address: IAmADemonHunter@hotmail.com.
“You’ll attract crazies.”
I didn’t want to explain it. Oh, she didn’t even believe in demons, let alone the need for hunting them. It was around that time Ashley and I were going to burn our Harry Potter books and, if she’d let me, my mom’s old Ouija board. I decided not to ask her. Instead I cried and thought about how I was letting the demons win.
--
I sat in Mom’s trailblazer, crying. It was raining; I watched the methodical swishing of the wipers as tears slid down my face. Mom was mad at me, but I was fuming. My arms were crossed. I answered her questions only partly as I stared narrow-eyed out the window.
“Are you upset because you kind of like Tom?” she asked. “It’s easy to have a crush on someone that gives you so much attention.”
“No.” I wasn’t in love. I hated the man.
Earlier that morning, Ashley and I had skipped Sunday school, because we were so mad at Tom and refused to even be in the same room as he. Mom was mad because Ashley and I talked long past the Sunday school hour, so she had been waiting on me in her car. I was a sophomore by then, nearly two years since Tom started working at my church; I was no longer blinded by the newness of him or the excitement of a young rookie youth pastor.
I don’t remember why I was mad at Tom. It was one of two reasons. It could have been the time he decided our church would no longer go to Lake James Christian Assembly, the camp I had been going to since I was in fourth grade. Or it was the time he divided my small group, separating Ashley and me. Both times I ended up mad at Tom.
Once I stopped crying, I tried to explain to Mom how I was feeling. She didn’t say things like, “Well, he’s your youth pastor, so he must know best,” because she didn’t know that, or she didn’t believe that. Instead, she let me cry and comforted me with her silence.
--
At fifteen, I was a romantic. I read a lot of Christian books that described God as the Great Romancer. I found myself relating to him only in that way—as a husband, a wooer.
Around that time I wrote a piece of fiction about a king who fell in love with a peasant girl named Joy. The king had to dress as a peasant in order to marry her. They fell in love and live happily ever after until she commits adultery with the Enemy. The king had to fight to win her heart back, which he did, and then they officially lived happily ever after. The piece was blatantly allegorical.
That Christmas, along with a bag of her favorite chocolate, I gave my mom this story and a letter I had written, telling her about Jesus. She came up to my room hours after the family left. She sat on the floor, holding the letter I had written, while I sorted the gifts I had received.
“Thank you for your letter, Lauren,” said.
I waited for the but.
“But I don’t believe in Jesus like you do.”
I started crying like I always cried when I felt uncomfortable talking about my beliefs.
“Your story was well-written though.”
I cried some more, without saying much, and she left. I felt embarrassed for a moment, until I prayed. My tears stopped when I heard in my heart or my soul a thank-you for what I had done, coming from who I believed was my Romancer God himself.
“Thanks for the birthday present,” the voice said.
--
“I know you want to help people, but can’t you do something safer?”
“But Mom—” I stopped myself. Yes, I could do something safer than, say, travel to the second most dangerous country in the world to help sick children—I could, but I didn’t want to.
Unlike my friends, I couldn’t use the Jesus-defense on her. I couldn’t tell Mom that I felt called to go. I couldn’t tell her that I’d been praying about it, or how I knew that God would keep me safe.
So I used every other defense I had: my good grades, my good behavior, my knowledge of the Middle East conflict and history. Those held little weight either. What convinced my mom to let me go to Iraq for a summer internship were other people talking to her. And, though I’d never tell her, a lot of prayer on my part.
--
“Do you remember that—that dream?” I ask my Mom on the phone. It’s been eighteen years since I scurried into her room, telling her of Jesus’ second death. It’s been so long, but I still remember the image of Christ on that scaffold. He’s crying, cut, bloody, and bruised.
“No, I don’t remember that at all.”
Mom and I don’t talk about our faith much. I tell her sometimes about my attempts at practicing Judaism, but even that doesn’t seem to impress her.
“It’s just kind of funny that you said that,” I tell her. I go on to explain the irony of her response to the dream, as if it were lost on her. I’m not sure if it was or not.
“I don’t remember that,” she repeated. “But I know if that happened again, I’d say the same thing. It worked, didn’t it? You went back to sleep.”