It seems to me God’s promise was always a place. What healing can manifest when place is restored, when those once dislocated from their home are delivered into it once again. They left their chains and began making their way back home. God didn’t raise up Moses just to free them from Pharaoh. I think of Abraham’s descendants leaving the promised land and being forced into bondage.

I don’t just want to be rescued I want to be taken someplace safe and good. Not just in “the heart,” but God standing on Fifth and Lothrop - God beyond the glass. If asked to choose, I want a God who is someplace. They seem quite concerned with the future of my faith, but they make the mistake of showing little interest in my present conditions. And I couldn’t tell her I had no desire to live forever.Īs someone who is made of more doubt than faith, I find that Christians tend to want to talk to me about salvation. For eternal life, God looks to the heart, she said. She motioned toward our fluorescent canopy and back to her chest. And I didn’t have the courage to say, I like my heart just fine. Until finally she said, That’s where you’re changed, pointing to her heart not mine. I, embarrassed (whether on my behalf or hers, I did not know), began alternating peeling my bare legs off of the plastic booth to fill in the silence between us. Why confined to a heart? She tried to defuse a look on her face by sipping on coffee that tasted like ash. I told her I wanted God out there doing something, nodding to the street beyond the glass window. She was gorgeous to me, even exposed to the fluorescent light rattling around us, but she spoke like the incarnation of a Hallmark card, which both aggravated and saddened me. I was in my first year at the University of Pittsburgh and she, her last. I was sitting in McDonald’s with my first Bible-study leader when I told her I didn’t want Jesus in my heart.

This here flesh cole arthur riley