Angry Conversations with God (4 page)

“Susie thinks she’s so smart!”

“Do not!” I shouted back.

“Dhoo hnnotttth!” She mimicked me like I was retarded.

“Stop it!”

“Hhhop itth!” There was no way to make her stop, no way to win, and no way out.

Worst of all, Kirsten got other girls to go along with her. My friends came to me in secret. “We really like you,” Lori promised.

“Yeah,” Sandy hissed. “Kirsten’s a…female dog!”

“Then why do you go along with her?” I protested.

“We don’t want her to get mad at us!” Lori cried.

“How do you think I feel?!”

“But you’re the only one who can stand up to her!”

It was true. No one stood up to Kirsten. Not even the teachers. Except for the overweight choir director, Mrs. Proctor. When
Mrs. Proctor saw Kirsten kicking my chair, her baton froze midair, her forearms jiggled to a stop, and she glared at Kirsten.
“Is that how you behave at home, Kirsten? Do you kick chairs when you don’t get your way?…Kirsten?”

“No, Miss Porker,” Kirsten replied.

The choir erupted in snickers. Kirsten was kicked out of choir. From then on she led a choir of her own: a chorus of snotty
kids who cackled “Miss Porker!” whenever the choir director walked by. “Miss Porker” morphed into “Porky Pig,” then
snort, snort!
Mrs. Proctor quit midyear from stress.

The missionary spinster teachers turned the other cheek. That’s how they had survived Maoist China, and that’s what they expected
me to do. But I couldn’t turn the other cheek. My cheeks burned with anger. Why wouldn’t Jesus give Kirsten a fourth-down
punt? Our pastor said God was good to you if you were good and evil to you if you were evil. But wasn’t Kirsten the evil one
here? Maybe God thought I was, because I got angry. Maybe my anger wasn’t the good kind. Maybe it was the bad kind of anger
like my father’s.

So as Kirsten whispered and kicked and got my friends to go along, I prayed to the Nice Jesus picture on the wall:
Please, Jesus, make her stop. Please, Jesus, make her nice. Please, Jesus, make her die.

The Nice Jesus sat there, his Nordic forehead turned toward the Father, eyes silently pleading for someone else. What happened
to the Jesus who comforted the brokenhearted, who stood up for the defenseless? Jesus loved me, that I
knew.
But Mom said Jesus loved Kirsten too. Which made him a traitor or a wimp, like everyone else.

Some days I came home and lay on my bed. My cat, Tig, always jumped up to join me and buried his head in my side. At least
Tig loved me. Then a thought came to me: I got Tig as a surprise two months before Kirsten came to school. Maybe Tig was God’s
gift. Maybe he knew I’d need a real friend, one that Kirsten couldn’t control. Maybe Tig was his way of saying, “I’m here,
I love you, and it’s going to be okay.”

“I know you’re here,” I prayed. “I know you love me. But I also want you to do something.”

There was no reply, only a loving presence. Well, my cat helped. Maybe that’s what the Holy Spirit was—someone who came to
be with you when God couldn’t fix things. Maybe Tig was the Holy Spirit.

“Susie?” My mother sat me down on her bed. It was right in the middle of my fifth-grade birthday party. “Susie, I hear you
say that you’re angry a lot. And that’s not good because if you’re angry, people won’t like you.”

Well, that really pissed me off. The reason I was
righteously
angry was because Kirsten was being
evil
to me, at my birthday party, in my house! Mom had invited Kirsten because we had to “be like Jesus and love everyone.” We
were playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey. When it was my turn to be blindfolded, Kirsten kicked me. So I ripped off the blindfold
and went after her, but Mom caught me and took me to her room.

And there we had the same conversation we’d been having ever since Kirsten came to my school. I said I didn’t do anything;
Mom said there were two sides to every story. I begged Mom to talk to Kirsten’s mom; Mom said Kirsten’s mom was just as bad
as Kirsten.

“Then talk to Principal Bergen!” I cried.

“Susie”—Mom’s voice wavered—“you have to learn to solve arguments yourself.”

“But I wasn’t arguing!
I had a blindfold on!
“

“I can’t do the work of two parents!” Mother cried, and ran out of the room.

I sat thinking about what Mom had said: how I had to learn to solve arguments myself. But from whom? Mom never solved arguments;
she just ran away. Then I thought of the other thing she’d said: people wouldn’t like me if I was angry. I knew it was true
because nobody liked my dad.

Olivet Lutheran School went through sixth grade. On the first day of my final year, I walked into class to discover that Jenny,
the only girl who’d ever stood by me, had left for TeWinkle, the public junior high. Kirsten sat in the chair behind mine,
ready for one last year of Lutheran-school tyranny.

That afternoon I found my mother in the backyard. “Mom, I want to go to TeWinkle.”

Mom kept her back to me as she watered her roses. The water spilled into her strawberry troughs and on into her nasturtiums.
Mom put a lot of work into her garden. It was her outlet for being ignored by my father. Like she was ignoring me now.

“Why do you want to leave Olivet?” Mom’s voice cracked.

She was acting like I wanted to leave Jesus. I didn’t want to leave Jesus; I loved Jesus. I just didn’t want to be bullied
anymore!

Mom began to cry. I went inside. Nothing more was said.

Three weeks later I was in Principal Bergen’s office, waiting to get paddled. As I looked up at the Nice Jesus on the wall,
I thought of how much he reminded me of my mother. Maybe because they were both brown-haired, Norwegian, and depressed.

Principal Bergen came out and sat next to me on the hard wooden bench. Miss Bergen spoke in a calm, Lutheranmissionary voice.
She had lived in Madagascar with pygmies. She had eaten monkey meat and intestines and shrunken heads. Nothing frightened
Miss Bergen.

“Susie, do you know why you’re here?”

That afternoon, Kirsten had gotten me out in a game of dodge ball—and she was on my team. Kirsten had been knocked out first.
And every play that I stayed in, she got more jealous. She whispered to our teammates, and they stopped passing me the ball.
She whispered to the opposing team, and they aimed only at me. But I was fast, agile, and pissed. I dodged; I jumped. I caught
the ball. I hurled it back. I hit boys out. Hard.

Finally, our team whittled down to two players: me and Edith Knapp, a slow girl who never got the ball because the boys didn’t
want cooties on it. Kirsten walked over and handed the ball to afat guy on the other team. He slammed it at my thigh, and
the ball fell to the ground. I was out. And Kirsten danced in triumph.

I ran at her, face pulsing, grabbed her thick, red ponytail like a lasso, and spun her around. Then I let go. Kirsten flew
outward. She skidded across the blacktop, scraping knees and elbows, the pebbles ripping into her powder-blue pantsuit. The
crowd gasped. Kirsten stared at me. Then she started bawling. The boys whooped. My secret friends ran to high-five me, but
I shoved their fickle hands away and waited for the PE teacher to haul me off to Principal Bergen.

“Susie,” Miss Bergen repeated, “do you know why you’re here?”

“Because I hurt Kirsten?”

“No. You’re here because your mother said you aren’t happy here. Is that true?”

“Miss Bergen! I don’t want to leave Jesus. I love Jesus.”

“I know that, Susie. But after what happened today…” Miss Bergen paused to consider. “I think you’ll be a lot happier.” She
winked, handed me a coupon for an ice-cream cone, and sent me on my way. In true Lutheran fashion, Miss Bergen had turned
the other cheek.

As I walked out, I looked up at the Nice Jesus on the wall. Yes, his eyes were pleading for me: “Come on, Dad. She had to
do it. She went into that temple and gave Kirsten the fourth-down punt.”

Rudy shook his head.

Rudy: Girls can be so cruel.

Susan: You know that adage, “If women ruled the world, there would be no war”? Whoever said that never rushed a sorority.
If women ran the UN, it would be brutal. “That beeotch didn’t invite me to her summit. I am
so
vetoing her ass.”

Rudy: You said something interesting. “God is good to you if you’re good, and evil if you’re evil.”

Susan: It’s there in 2 Samuel: “To the pure you show yourself pure, but to the wicked you show yourself hostile.” I’ve had
it drilled into my head: If you do right, your life will go well. If your life isn’t going well, you’re doing something wrong.

Rudy: But there are plenty of verses that ask, “Why do the righteous suffer?”

Susan: That sums up my last three years at Olivet. I learned not to trust girls, I learned not to bother Mom with my problems,
and I learned that no matter how much Jesus loved me—and I knew he did—he still wasn’t getting off that wall to save me. I
was on my own.

Rudy: Well, I think we need Jesus to show up and answer for himself.

Now I had to imagine Jesus in the room with us. Amazing, that
Head of Christ.
Some Midwestern painter sold a few portraits to a Bible supply shop and influenced an entire society as to what Jesus looked
like. But I couldn’t help but see Jesus with those same kind, sad eyes. Now that I imagined his eyes on me, I felt stupid
complaining about a bully.

Jesus: Susan, I’m so sorry you feel like I didn’t come through for you. But you did know I was there; you did feel my love.
Didn’t you?

Susan: I did. Thank you.

Jesus: No problem.

Rudy: (To Susan) Wait. Is that it?!

Susan: The guy hung on a cross for me. I got bullied for three years. Big deal.

Rudy: But it was a big deal for you as a child. You prayed to Jesus and he didn’t answer.

Susan: I know the answer, Rudy. Life is filled with hardship. There are bad people in the world, and I had to learn how to
deal with them.

Rudy: I know a man who was molested by a priest for years. He needs a better answer than that. So do you. It doesn’t matter
how small it seems
now,
we’re here because of how big it felt
then.
You need to tell Jesus that.

Jesus: It’s okay. You can talk to me.

Susan: Okay. I know it wasn’t your fault—

Rudy: And?

Susan: Back then it was the one thing I prayed for, that you’d stop Kirsten from bullying me. But you never answered.

Jesus: It
seemed
like I didn’t answer.

Susan: No, Jesus. You
didn’t answer.
Nobody came. I had to fight for myself.

Jesus: That’s how I answered. I taught you to fight for yourself.

Susan: I was a kid! I didn’t want to fight. My mom said people wouldn’t like me!

Jesus: What did you want me to do?

Susan: Smite Kirsten? Drive her away like the chaff? Get my mom to do something? Or the teachers or Miss Bergen or Pastor
Ingebretsen? Or anybody?

Jesus: It took a lot for your mother to talk to Miss Bergen. She was terrified.

Susan: But the damage was done. It made you look like the wimp, because those people represented you!

Jesus: I don’t know if this will help. For centuries society had blamed God for being a vengeful God. When you were young,
the Vietnam War was going on. Your church was trying to practice peace. They were trying to turn the other cheek.

Susan: But they didn’t turn the other cheek; they turned the other way. They rolled over and played dead.

Jesus: You’re right.

Susan: Do you blame me for thinking you were a wimp?

Jesus: No. I don’t.

Rudy: When I was a pastor and saw weird things go on, I was told to “let the Lord take care of it.” It’s messed up.

Jesus: You think I don’t know that? I feel it every day.

I guess I could see Jesus’ point of view. He spent his lifetime fighting on behalf of the poor and oppressed. He died on a
cross to end that oppression. Yet it was still going on. No wonder he still looked depressed.

HERE'S A QUESTION PEOPLE OFTEN ASK A COUPLE: “HOW DID
you two meet?” I suppose the Father would drag out some impressive Bible verse about how he knew me “before the foundation
of the world” (Eph. 1:4 nkjv). However, I'd like to stick to the period of recorded history in which I was alive, aware, and
able to respond.