When Spirit entered the chamber it was dark, damp, and smelled of sorrow. He hurried to his seat in the blue velvet chair, leaned forward, his head towering over hers, and grasped her heaving, inconsolable shoulders.
“Why are you crying, Mishalariah?”
Through racking sobs, Mishalariah replied, “She was so lonely... so we showed her... a new church… in her new neighborhood… She listened to us… and—” Her hands shook as she lifted the Ayin for Spirit to see. “Look!… They are laughing at her.”
Spirit took the Ayin from her trembling hands. What he saw within the glistening surface made him moan.
Mishalariah crumpled to her knees, her head at his feet, her body rocking in acute misery. “How can your people… be so cruel?”
Spirit winced at her accusation, then gently stroked her head and shoulders until her sobs subsided.
Through lips that still quivered, she asked, “Why did they ask her to sing with them if they thought she was foolish? She is no fool. She loves you with her whole heart.” Mishalariah’s next words were barely a whisper. “She deserves better than this.”
Spirit lifted the Ayin to his mouth and breathed on its surface, covering it with dew. When the fog cleared, he held it out to her.
“Look again.”
The choir members were no longer laughing. They were looking down at their hymn books in silence, some even blushing with shame.
Mishalariah’s eyebrows arched. “What happened?”
“They are beginning to see you.”
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A Speculative Memoir
In a 1989 journal entry, I poured out my dashed dreams to God. Those few precious moments became a watershed event in an unfolding narrative that began ten years before when I turned my back on God. Turning my back on God did many things, most of them sad, but foremost it made me forget who I was. But there was someone who never forgot. Someone who neve…