What I learned this week:
Never sit in seat 21C again.
While settling in on a flight to Seattle, the woman sitting next to me uttered one of several phrases that you never want to hear in a confined space.
“Are you a Christian?”
I let out a deep sigh and eyed the woman carefully. Answering this question wrongly can get you killed in some parts of the world. I was not looking forward to the theological quagmire awaiting me for the next three hours.
I spent a few seconds deciding if I was going to tell her I worshiped the devil, or perhaps Vishnu, the Indian God of Mercury. I wasn’t sure if I could adequately remember all the tenants of Bhudism that I learned in my junior college philosophy class and I’d just spent three days in Salt Lake City, where worshiping Jesus isn’t enough for some people.
I decided to go with honesty and hope for the best.
“Yes, I am,” I told her, quickly flipping open my laptop and hoping she’d take the hint.
“That’s wonderful. You know, I’ve written a children’s book for Christians.”
“Oh, wow,” I used that strained version of “wow” that implies you are not really impressed with a person’s accomplishment, but are polite enough to recognize they did accomplish something. “That’s great.”
I was now comfortable with the impression that she wasn’t going to try converting me, just sell me a few copies of her little book for the holiday season.
“Well, I didn’t really write it,” she went on. “He did most of it.”
She pointed to the sky, in case I wasn’t sure which “he” she was referencing. Now, a lot of people give God credit for their creative efforts, so I saw no real harm in this last statement.
“God wrote this book through me,” she stated flatly.
That last part wasn’t so much a sales pitch as a little slice of crazy pie for me to snack on.
She would soon start serving it up like a lunch lady the day after the lasagna surprise goes bad.
I mean, full on lunatic. I never did get to watch the DVD of “Friends” I had brought to get me through the skies over Northern California, Oregon and Washington. For the next two hours, I listened as the lady sitting next to me described God’s vision of a new bible (her children’s book). How he used her to write the book and have it illustrated (oh, yes, there were pictures).
She went on a few tangents, as the ill-minded are apt to do sometimes. There was a bit about bar codes and my personal number and how I didn’t want to get 666 stamped on me. Did I know what 666 was? Did I? Did I? Did I!!!
Mostly, though, she kept hawking her book. She asked me to read it, expressing hope that I would have a “special feeling” upon finishing the tome.
Reading the book was similar to reading a take-out menu that some poor schlep has stuck under your door for a quarter an hour or whatever it is those guys make. That is to say, about every third sentence contained a typo, an extra space, or a word that was not quite right for the passage but probably looked good when it popped up in the Microsoft Word thesaurus.
The story itself concerned a boy in a wheelchair who is placed in an orphanage after his mother dies and his father decides he is incapable of raising children. The boy reads books on theology while the other orphans play outside and learns about “the creator.” (That’s God, by the way.)
Eventually, the boy meets the CREATOR (who’s name is suddenly spelled in all-caps about halfway through the book), tells him he wants to be happy, gets to walk and lives to be a hundred years old.
“Do you get it?” the lady asked me.
“It’s about having faith,” I replied, not having really learned that lesson, but hoping that was her angle.
“Yes!” she exclaimed.
“Very cool,” I said and turned back to my laptop, but to no avail.
The woman informed me that God’s goal was for her to get the book into every household in the world. This book would be a more simple version of the bible. It would be a simple version that people either “got” or didn’t.
As one of the fortunate ones who got the book, she was counting on me to help her spread the word.
By this point, my plane flight was about as long as this posting. I was desperate for relief. Long story short, all of my friends will be getting a nice bound copy of “The Creator” in their stockings this Christmas.
