The Seer~Part Three

I positively stormed through the church. Who did that pastor think he is?

I had just gotten done with a meeting with the Pastor Dan to talk about my life. He did it routinely with members of the church who had been struggling. I was sure I had never heard so crazy a theory for my ability than what I had heard from the pastor. According to him, when I was good and sinless no one around me died, but when I was wicked, people around me died as "punishment."

"God has given you an advantage though," Pastor Rick had said. "You can see when the people in your life are going to die. You can literally see when you have upset God! Considering the many deaths you have foreseen then witnessed, you must be doing something particularly bad. I would recommend you search yourself and ask forgiveness for whatever it is you have done."

'The only things I need to ask forgiveness for is what I called that man in my head while he was talking!' I was in a rage. A stranger fell off a bus, and my little sister got cancer, and that supposed "man of God" says it is my fault. God! I wanted to scream.

Surrendering to the tantrum throwing two year old inside of me I kicked the wall. It was in a hardly used hallway and no one was looking. I kicked again, feeling pleasure at the crumbling dry wall give under my foot.

"Any particular reason you're destroying church property?"

I nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard him. I whirled around and saw it was a man, probably late fifties, wearing a pair of old jeans, a tee shirt tucked into them, and a blue baseball cap.

"Hope you realize you will be paying for that," the man said walking closer.

I was numb with shock. It took me several moments to comprehend what he had said, and several more to articulate an answer.

"Oh yea," I responded sluggishly, "sorry."

"Name's Jim by the way," the man said, toeing the white stuff on the floor which had once been part of the wall.

"Sarah," I said, accepting Jim's hand.

Jim looked me up and down. "Now where I come from, young women didn't go around kicking walls for no reason. What's wrong honey?"

I couldn't hold it in any longer. "My pastor is a jackass."

Jim nodded. "That's why I left his church, so I could join a church," he said this while he walked down the hall, motioning for me to follow.

"I'm going to inform you I am in idiot," I said walking besides the man. "I don't follow."

"I'm this church's janitor," Jim said, "but I don't come here anymore. What the majority of this church believes and what I believe are too.....different. So, I quit being a janitor and left the church. The staff tried to find someone to replace me, but couldn't find anyone who did my job half as well as I did. So here I am. I clean this building but I don't come Sundays."

"Isn't that a bit...unorthodox?" I asked, struggling to find the right word.

Jim cast me a wily glance. "Do you share your boss's beliefs?"

"No, what..."

"Does your world view match your co-workers'."

"No."

"This is no worse."

Jim and I continued on our way to the janitor's closet/Jim's office. There, there was supplies to fix the wall. Jim grabbed a dry wall patch, spackling, and one of those scrapey metal things I can't remember the name of. During the walk back to the hole I had kicked in the wall I was asked by Jim why I had done so.

In a few words as possible I explained. I typically wouldn't have shared about my ability to someone I had met ten minutes previous, but it was clear Jim wasn't simply making small talk. He was one of those people who when they asked, "How are you doing?" he meant how are you doing. If you told him life sucks right now, he would nod his head and ask why. Funny, but I could tell he was like this within the ten minutes I had known him.

Jim fixed the hole as I told my story. Silent and meditative on the words I was saying. He finished patching the wall around the same time I finished my story. Jim leaned back on his hunches.

"So," he said.

"So what?"

"You tell me?"

I flopped onto the floor. "Why would God do this to me?"

"Make you see how people are going to die?"

"Well, that too, but why make everyone around me die on top of that. You can't deny that I have been surrounded by an uncommon amount of deaths."

Jim had taken his cap off and was fiddling with it. "Honey, that's like asking why God kills all those children in Africa. That's like asking why He gave your sister cancer, why he caused your mama to give birth to a child that killed her, and why He caused that baby to die three months later."

Tears formed in my eyes. "Well, He did to those things, didn't He? If He really is in control, yea, He did."

Jim sighed. "Now, I'm not saying I don't believe in a personal God, I do. My strongest relationship is with God, but did it ever occur to you He doesn't move us all around like pieces on a chess board. He lets us make the choices, and there's another player Sarah. And he's got just as much right as God does to make up rules, and to order his half of the pieces around."

I shook my head. "I thought God was in control."

"Oh, He is, make no mistake. As in control of your soul as you let Him. God could overturn the board any time He wanted to and Satan couldn't do a thing about it. Even if he could he wouldn't."

He paused, and when I looked at him curiously he continued.

"Satan would win then. Oh yes, if God made us robots so we would love God no matter what, Satan would win. The whole point is that in order for us to truly love God and by good, there needs to be a choice. Now in the beginning God stacked the odds in our favor. Yep, hundreds of good things to do, and only one bad. By doing that one bad thing, man opened God's creation up to the destruction of Satan. All the bad stuff in the world is the result of Adam giving Satan permission to play. The fall isn't as much a punishment as a natural consequences from making a stupid decision."

"So God really isn't watching over us," I said cynically. "Now that we've let Satan in God really doesn't care?"

"It's not like that," Jim said with more force than I had heard him use yet. "Casting your cares on God doesn't mean He will take care of those problem so you don't have to do those things. It means He will give you the strength to face those thing. He will give you comfort in the way only He can. He's fighting all the time in the most important battle field of all. You."

I blinked. "Me?"

Jim nodded. "Every day God and Satan are both throwing all they can at you to try to make you choose them. But as much as either one of them try to win you, in the end it is your choice. You can either choose to let your ability make you bitter and a servant of Satan, or you could let God use it. It's your choice."

Jim put his cap on and got up, collecting the spackling and the scrapy thingy. He left without another word. I let all that he had said sink in. A few minutes later I realized I was late for work. So getting up I left as well.