Excerpt of Courage in Patience by Beth Fehlbaum

Chapter 1

When I was in seventh grade, a local church began to
evangelize by passing out flyers announcing "pizza parties"
on Friday evenings. I had already become suspicious of
other people's motives for being nice to me, so I wondered
why strangers would want to feed me pizza. What I found out
was that the "parties" were really revivals, and the idea
of a man yelling hellfire and brimstone stuff at me was
more than I could take.

Believe it or not, we were members of the Methodist
church. It was, in fact, one of the few places I felt safe
and loved. People did not really know us; they had no idea
what we were like at home, but they accepted our masks.
Charlie was head of the landscaping committee, and my mom
was a lay leader, a member who helped lead the
congregation. I'm sure the people who told me how lucky I
was to have such wonderful parents would be shocked to know
the dirty little secret of Charlie's nighttime activities.
I think the reason I felt so loved at church was that the
minister told me that God IS Love. God didn't create
ugliness in the world. God was not a punishing god. God was
there to hold you up when you thought you couldn't take
anymore. The God I knew didn't list conditions for His
loving me.

I didn't have any close friends, but when my
classmates came back to school on the Monday after
the "Give Your Heart to Jesus and Have a Slice of
Pepperoni" thing, they carried Bibles, pamphlets, and
holier-than-thou attitudes toward anyone who wasn't there.

"Have you been saved, Ashley?" Korey Hendrix asked
as he slid into his seat to my right in first period math
class.

"I … think so. I mean, we don't use that word in my
church, but I've been baptized," I said, as I finished
writing my heading on my paper.

"And how were you baptized? Did'ja go under water?"
Korey never even acknowledged that I took up space in the
row next to his, unless he wanted to borrow a piece of
paper or have me pass a note to Sherry Brown, who he was
going out with. Why was he so interested in me now?

I had a bad feeling about this. "No, the minister
put some water on my head."

"Did you pray this prayer?" Mary Hood chimed in
from two seats behind me. She recited what amounted
to: "Jesus, I know I'm a horrible person and I don't
deserve Your love, but the wretched piece of crap that I am
humbly asks for You to lower Your standards enough to allow
me to be called one of Your children. In Your name, I pray.
Amen."

Of course I replied that I hadn't said a prayer
like that, even though I had never known any belief but
Christianity. I was a "cradle Christian." But apparently
not the right kind.

"You're supposed to pray this prayer and cry a lot.
It's how you know the Devil has been washed out of your
soul," said Korey, turning to the back page of his
pamphlet.

"If you didn't cry, how can you really know you've
been saved, Ashley?" I jumped when she spoke; I didn't
realize that Cynthia Morris was standing to my left,
looking down at me.

There were so many more happy and peaceful born-
again zombies surrounding me at school, I began to wonder
if they were right. Maybe God was punishing me for being
the wrong kind of Christian, by allowing me to be spied on,
groped, pulled at … you get the idea. I thought, "If I can
get some of what they've got, I'll have some of their peace
too." And maybe God would smite Charlie, or at least make
him leave me alone.

I never went to one of the pizza parties, but I did
start riding my bike down to the Christian bookstore in my
neighborhood. It was one of those bookstores that put books
about Catholicism and Buddhism in the "cult" section. I
spent hours poring over the literature, to the strange
looks of the clerks. I mean, how many twelve- and thirteen-
year-old girls spent time in the self-help section of their
store? I couldn't afford the hardcover books they had
on "how to bring happiness to your home," but I did buy
little soft-cover gems like The Jesus Person's Pocket Book
of Promises. In it, I found over one hundred numbered
promises Jesus had made to me, most of them regurgitations
of the prayer my newly blessed friends had cited as The
Way, written from Jesus' point of view, which only people
who attended pizza party revivals, certain churches, and
were baptized the "right" way were privy to.

I was in so much pain and so angry all the time, I
figured I would try anything once, or twice … or countless
times. Maybe I was so fundamentally flawed, I wasn't even
doing Christianity right. The thing was, I couldn't cry. I
prayed that damn prayer so many times on my knees beside my
bed, like it said to do. Then I'd wait for the
uplifted, "saved" feeling that would happen when the Holy
Spirit filled my body and soul, but it never came. Maybe I
was such a worthless person even God had turned His back on
me. I became angrier then, and curious about the nature of
evil. How did bad people come into the power they had?

I biked to the library and checked out a book on
Adolph Hitler, the baddest of the bad that I could think
of. Why did people listen to him? How did a person who was
so evil become so powerful? I wanted to know.

When my mother saw the book on my desk in my
bedroom, she snatched it up and insisted that I take it
back immediately. "I will not have that man in my house!"
she railed. "He was a tyrant and an evil person!"

"Yeah, I know, Mom, that's why I want to figure out
why people listened to him."

"No! Get that book out of my house!" she flung open
the front door and let me know that if I didn't take the
book back to the library immediately, she would throw it
into the street.

You know, it almost makes me laugh. My mother's
high sensitivity to the presence of evil in a bunch of
pages bound together with glue and a cover, coexisting with
her complete refusal to acknowledge the real Satan sleeping
next to her each night (when he wasn't trying to pull me
out of my covers, that is). It's freakin' surreal. I could
laugh at how clueless she is, if it weren't so painful.

As Charlie's pursuits and mental games became more
intense, the survivalist within me really started to
emerge. Or the terrified coward. It's pretty much a toss-
up. Like Hitler and my stepfather living at one point on
the same planet, there is a tough, take-no-prisoners
survivor—and a pathetic wimp—living together inside of me.